Google Says Billions Of Redirects Are Advantageous But Web site Strikes Do Impression Rankings

Someone is looking to move to a new CMS where the site has 20,000 products on the front-end of the website. When the site switches to a new CMS, it sounds like the URLs will need to change. He asked if he could redirect 20,000 URLs.

The answer is yes, he should do that, if he cannot keep those URLs the same. And yes, that process should be automated, John Mueller of Google said on Twitter:

You should redirect all pages. It sounds like it would be worthwhile to talk with your developers and have them do it programmatically.

— 🍟 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🍟 (@JohnMu) September 1, 2022

But if you had 20 billion URLs, you should do the same thing, redirect them all, John added. But don’t expect rankings not to change at all, rankings change with new URLs and new CMS platforms. So don’t expect to see no ranking changes when making CMS changes.

Here is where John said that:

You can do 20 billion redirects. And yes, all site migrations / CMS changes WILL affect search. It’s a new website, after all. You can’t change everything and also expect everything to remain the same.

— 🍟 johnmu (personal) updated for 2022 🍟 (@JohnMu) September 1, 2022

Forum discussion at Twitter.