Introduction

Redirects are a critical part of maintaining a seamless user experience and protecting your site's SEO performance. Whether you're retiring products, restructuring content, or cleaning up broken links, effective redirect management ensures your visitors—and search engines—always land in the right place.

There are two parts to the Redirect functionality in Cloud MT -  Inactive Products Redirect and the Redirect Manager.

Inactive Product Redirects

This offers precise control over how users and search engines interact with URLs associated with inactive products. This is essential for managing discontinued items or updated product lines.

When a product is deactivated, there are four redirect options available on the Cloud MT product page, under the find & filter options.

1. Redirect to Find and Filter Page: This option directs users to the relevant product find and filter page (department or item group), allowing them to explore similar items, thereby maintaining engagement even if the specific product is unavailable. In the example below, the item is in the clothing department and jersey item group

2. Return a Not Found: This returns a 404 Not Found page, explicitly signaling that the content is no longer available.

3. Specific URL: This redirects to a specific relative path. The URL is validated to ensure that it exists.

4. None: This continues to serve the product page without a redirect.

Redirect Manager

Use this page to configure a redirect from a given URL to either a custom URL or the Not Found (404) page. 

Please use the link preview to check that your URL is correct.

This is an invaluable tool for site restructuring, content migration, and resolving broken links.

Creating a Redirect

To access the redirect manager, go to Menu, expand Site Management and then select Redirect Manager

• Redirect Type: Select the type of redirect, custom URL or Not Found
• Site Number: If you manage multiple websites in Cloud MT, select the relevant site number in this drop-down.
• From: the URL you are redirecting from. This URL does not need to exist, but must not be start with either of these fragments (cart, checkout, account, instock and common). URLs are relative and must not start with a '/'.
• To: the URL you are redirecting to. This must be on the website and is validated to ensure that it exists.
• Pass Query Parameters: If enabled, the query string will be passed through to the To URL. e.g. with t-shirts as the From URL and tops as the To URL, then a request to t-shirts?maxprice=20 will be redirected to tops?maxprice=20.
  If disabled, the query string will be removed.

URL Validation

Please use the link preview to check that your URL is correct.

The To URL is validated to ensure it exists.

If the URL involves redirects, we'll automatically update this value to the final URL (unless the number of redirects exceeds 10, which causes the URL to be considered invalid).

e.g. if there is already a custom redirect from /events to /about-us, adding a redirect from /news to /events will automatically redirect /news to /about-us

The To URL must not resolve to the From URL.

There must not be an existing redirect with the same From URL.

Product Redirect Viewer - Inactive Item Redirect

This report shows whether a redirect exists for any item that has previously been active but is now inactive.

To access it, select the Inactive Item Redirect button on the Redirect Manager page.

By default, items that have a redirect will be hidden. Change the Has Redirect? column filter to show all inactive items.

Inactive items, which have never been activated, will not be shown in this report.

The Edit link opens the product page to edit the product's redirect.

This is an easy way to manage redirects for any item which never been activated before.

By strategically leveraging the comprehensive capabilities of the Redirect Manager, you can significantly enhance your website's navigational integrity, maintain its SEO authority, and deliver a consistently optimized experience for your users.