Why not redirecting everything when migrating?

This article was first published on LinkedIn (join me here) and was called In case of an SEO rebuilding, is it necessary to redirect all your pages? it is based on an article I wrote for my former Web Agency in France

Basis of indexation?

At first you could say that the answer is yes and totally YES, because you don't want to loose history, popularity and stuff like this. But as you can see in my article (in french), we've got to weight things up:

• does all your pages need to be index
• meaning accuracy for some or some pages that should have not been indexed in the first place
• Redirects are good but you will have the chance to "come clean"

In this article, I explain why in some cases, it could be interesting to choose which pages you will be redirecting. And I give you some tips about HTTP code responses ;-)

HTTP answer codes

Yes we will be talking about 301 for permanent redirects, but also 410 as Gone to remove some "old URLs" from the index. And don't forget it is possible that we will encounter 307 for the HSTS protocol changes.