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  3. Setting up custom redirects

Setting up custom redirects

We can help setup a custom mapping of 301 permanent redirects as needed to automatically redirect visitors and search engines from a set of old URLs to new URLs. Some examples of when this would be useful and how it would work are described below.

Custom Redirects

Use Case: Migrating knowledge base systems

If you're migrating from an old support site to one powered by HelpSite, the URLs of individual articles will change. HelpSite takes great care in optimizing your site for search engines and each article will have an SEO-friendly URL.

However, in the cases where you have your content living on existing URLs already,  we can help setup a custom mapping of 301 permanent redirects for each of your old articles & URLs to point to your new mapping of articles & URLs on HelpSite.

Example:

An example would be if your "How do I reset my password" article used to live at https://help.example.com/hc/en-us/articles/215714403. Once you point your that subdomain over to HelpSite and migrate your content, that same article would start to live at a URL like https://help.example.com/articles/35163-how-do-i-reset-my-password. Since there may be existing links on the web to the old URL (and since Google may have it indexed), we can setup a 301 redirect from /hc/en-us/articles/215714403 to /articles/35163-how-do-i-reset-my-password for you.

Use Case: Deleting existing articles within HelpSite

Another example would be for a custom who has been using HelpSite for a long time, and wants to merge two existing articles together, effectively deleting one of them. In this case we could setup a custom redirect from the URL of the article you deleted to point to the other article with similar content.

How to setup custom redirects

To get started, just head to Customize > Redirects and then add redirects individually, or you can add redirects in bulk by pasting in data from a spreadsheet.

Note: This feature requires being on a paid plan that supports the Custom Redirects feature.

Automatic Redirects

Renaming Articles

Note: When you rename (edit the title of) an article within HelpSite, a 301 redirect applies automatically, without requesting one to be setup.

For example: If you rename an article on HelpSite from "How do I reset my password?" to "Resetting your password" then the old URL like https://help.example.com/articles/35163-how-do-i-reset-my-password would redirect to a new URL like https://help.example.com/articles/35163-resetting-my-password automatically without any additional action needed.