When You Move Pages and Sections

When You Move Pages and Sections Image

Because page URLs consist of their permalink plus their location, a URL will change if you:

  • move the page into another section
  • change the permalink of the page
  • change the permalink of one of the sections containing your page
  • change the location of one of the sections containing your page

Don't let that stop you from reorganizing your site.

CHSSWeb stores each page or section's URL history. When a visitor comes to a URL on your site and there is no matching page or section for that URL, the system looks into the site's URL history for that URL. If it finds a match, it redirects the visitor to the most recent location of that page or section and sends a code to the browser indicating that the page has permanently moved. This code is particularly important to search engines. It tells them they should still be listing that page but that it is now in a new location.

If there is no match in the site's URL history (for instance, if the page was deleted) CHSSWeb displays a page indicating that no content was found and tells the browser the address is invalid. This is also important to search engines. It tells them that they should no longer wend people to that page.

This means that you can move your pages around without losing traffic. If someone comes looking for the page at its old location, we will let them know it has moved.