Worked example, not a client
A Swansea shop's redesign: the redirect map, old address to new, in both languages
A Swansea shop with a ten-year-old site, forty pages and a Welsh version served by a cookie, rebuilds on a new structure with the Welsh under its own folder. This page is the redirect map as we would write it before the build, old address to new, with the Welsh lines beside the English, and the three lines that an English-only map would have missed. The shop is a composite; the addresses are illustrative.
Written by Daniel Stoychev. The shop and its addresses are illustrative. The map's shape, the one-to-one rule and the Welsh lines are the method in the redesign guide linked below.
Worked example. The shop is invented to show a redirect map in the form we write it. The rules it follows, one old address to one new address, Welsh to Welsh, and a real not-found for what is dropped, are the real ones.
The map
Old address to new, one line each, illustrative
| Old address | New address | Why |
|---|---|---|
| /products.php?cat=12 | /furniture | The category page, earning; kept as a page, renamed from a number to a name |
| /products.php?cat=12&lang=cy | /cy/dodrefn | The Welsh version, which had no address of its own before; now a page Google can see |
| /about-us.html | /about | One to one |
| /about-us.html?lang=cy | /cy/amdanom | The Welsh twin, not the Welsh home page |
| /news/2019/summer-sale | Not redirected; returns not found | Six years old, no impressions, no links; dropped on purpose |
| /contact.html | /contact | One to one; the phone and the map stay where Google found them |
| /images/sofa-oak-large.jpg | /images/oak-sofa.jpg | Image search traffic lands on images; they are mapped too |
| /brochure.pdf | /furniture | A document nobody updated; mapped to the page that replaces it |
Forty pages, two languages, sixty-three lines. The three nearly missed were the Welsh lines, because the old site had no Welsh addresses, only a cookie; the images, because nobody thinks of image search; and the PDF, which had a handful of links from a local directory.
Launch day
The five checks, as they came back
- Every old address fetched from the map: sixty-one returned a permanent redirect in one hop; two chained through an old redirect from a 2019 rename and were fixed to one hop the same hour.
- Five new pages viewed in source: no noindex line, the staging robots file gone, the canonical on each pointing at itself.
- A Welsh page and its English twin: hreflang both ways, canonical to self, and the Welsh old address landing on the Welsh new one.
- The sitemap fetched: new addresses only, with real dates, both languages, submitted in both Search Console properties that afternoon.
- The form submitted and the number rung: the enquiry arrived, the analytics recorded it.
Three weeks later
What the report would say
Impressions on the mapped category pages held through the first week and rose in the second, as Google recrawled the new addresses. The Welsh folder appeared in the Pages report with its own impressions for the first time, from nothing, which is a gain the old cookie version could never have shown. Nothing structural was touched for a month, and the first month's report compared page by page with the same weeks before launch, which is the comparison the map exists to make possible.
Where this leads
The pages that do this work
Find out what your website is doing for you, in plain English
Send the address, or say you have none, and tell us where in Wales you are. Daniel Stoychev reads it and replies within one working day with what a customer sees, what Google sees, whether Welsh belongs on the site, and a fixed price.