> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.get-ryze.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# URL redirects and migrations

> How to manage URL redirects on Shopify, what to redirect when products are removed, and how to run a migration without losing accumulated ranking and citation history.

A redirect preserves the value a URL has accumulated — links, rankings, and citation history — when that URL changes or disappears. Losing redirects during a migration is one of the few SEO mistakes that is both severe and permanent.

## Creating redirects on Shopify

URL redirects are managed in the Shopify admin under **Online Store → Navigation → URL Redirects**. Shopify issues them as `301` (permanent), which is what you want for anything that has moved for good.

You can bulk import redirects via CSV, which is essential for migrations.

## What to redirect

| situation                        | action                                                                                                  |
| -------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Product permanently discontinued | 301 to the closest equivalent product, or the parent collection                                         |
| Product temporarily out of stock | **Do not redirect.** Keep the page live — see [out-of-stock products](/ecommerce/out-of-stock-products) |
| Collection merged into another   | 301 to the surviving collection                                                                         |
| Product renamed (handle changed) | Shopify creates this automatically; verify it exists                                                    |
| Page deleted with no equivalent  | 410, or 301 to the most relevant parent                                                                 |
| Domain change                    | 301 every URL to its new equivalent                                                                     |

## Redirect to the closest equivalent, not the homepage

Mass-redirecting removed products to the homepage is treated as a soft 404 — the destination does not satisfy the original intent, so the value is not passed. Redirect to the nearest genuinely relevant page. Where none exists, the collection is a better target than the homepage.

## Migration checklist

Losing traffic in a migration is almost always a redirect failure. Before switching:

1. **Crawl the existing site** and export every indexable URL
2. **Export Search Console data** — every URL with impressions or clicks over the last 16 months
3. **Export your backlink profile** — URLs with external links are the highest priority
4. **Map old URL → new URL** for every one of them, individually
5. **Load redirects before the switch**, not after
6. **Verify after launch** by crawling the old URL list and confirming each returns a single 301 to a 200

## After launch

* Submit the new sitemap in Search Console
* Watch Search Console → Pages for a spike in 404s and fix as they appear
* Check for redirect chains — each additional hop loses a little and wastes crawl
* Expect a temporary dip in rankings; a clean migration recovers, a broken one does not

## Redirect chains

`A → B → C` should be collapsed to `A → C`. Chains accumulate silently over years of small changes and waste crawl budget on large stores. Ryze flags them during the [audit](/shopify/audit).

## Why this matters beyond rankings

A moved page loses accumulated citation history in AI answers as well as search rankings. Since [citations are volatile](/ai-visibility/citations-report) to begin with, a broken URL is unlikely to be re-earned quickly. Decide slugs once and keep them.

## Related

* [Fixing duplicate content and canonicals](/shopify/duplicate-content)
* [Sitemaps on Shopify](/shopify/sitemaps)