Sitemaps to bulk 301-Redirect With Rapid301
If you are an SEO agency doing a site migration, you probably use a tool like Screaming Frog or Ahrefs to generate a sitemap of the OLD SITE. This lets you know which pages need to be rebuilt.
After the pages have been rebuilt, you get the sitemap from the STAGING SITE and prepare to create a 301-redirect csv or .htaccess file in a spreadsheet.
In this guide we will explore how to map the OLD SITE and STAGING SITE urls in bulk (it takes just a few seconds) using Rapid301's bulk 301-redirect generator.
Note: Working on a migration? Read our full guide.
The Process To Match Redirects
Creating a 301-redirect CSV or .htaccess file from the old and new sitemaps involves the following steps:
- Remove all the duplicate URLS from the OLD SITE and STAGING SITE sitemaps.
- Delete all URLS from sitemaps where the URL did not change.
- Ensure there are no 404 paths in the STAGING sitemap.
- Match the most relevant path on the STAGING SITE to the corresponding path on the OLD SITE.
- Ensure only the paths are kept (if the domain is the same, remove the old domain and staging domain from the document).
- Export the redirects as a CSV File or in a format in which they can be added to the .htaccess file.
Fastest Way To Create 301-Redirects
After doing lots of rebuilds, we built Rapid301 to automate this manual process.
Simply upload your .csv sitemaps from Screaming Frog, Google Search Console or equivalent and Rapid301 will automatically match up the most relevant paths.
You can then review the output in the 301 redirect super table to ensure the best paths have been mapped, then export and upload.
