Redirects for eCommerce Site Migration

Question

I'm in the process of migrating my ecommerce store to a new platform/server.

I have some questions regarding redirects:

1. The website was made in asp.net and a lot of the product listings have different URLs (depending on how you arrive to the product). Should all of these URLs be redirected to the new URL?

e.g. - coming to the product from a category page will have a different URL than from an internal search page..

2. Should I redirect internal search results pages? These are indexed in Google...do I need to make a new category page containing these products so that the 301 redirect is relevant? redirect to a relevant search query URL? Or should I 404 them?

3. Is redirecting non-indexed pages necessary?

Thank you for your answers..

Answer 1

1. No matter how may URLs be generated for the same product page, but canonical must be the same for all of those duplicate URLs. For example, suppose your product page generate four different URLs for product A.

   • Search: https://www.example.com/?search=productname
   • From the website navigation: https://www.example.com/productname
   • Another duplicate URL: https://www.example.com/categorypage/productname

   So, above all must contain the same canonical URL, which should be the second one: https://www.example.com/productname

   Now, you have to redirect all the webpages to the new website and set proper canonical tags. No need to redirect search pages. Consider your GA data and GSC data. Don’t miss any important page.

   No need to redirect duplicate pages or dynamically generate webpages until you have a proper page in the new website.

2. I usually do not allow indexing for search pages. So, Pages which are indexed, redirect them to the relevant webpages and leave rest of the webpages.

   For example, if “product1” search page is indexed, redirect that search page to the “product1” page.

3. You can avoid them. But considering users stand point, redesign your 404 pages and allow users to search and navigate your website from 404 pages.