Can I redirect users from my website to the help center without affecting SEO?

Question

Can I redirect users from my previous support website to the help center with minimal impact on SEO?

Answer

Yes, when you change help centers, you can reduce the impact to the index status of your articles on external search engines.

You must follow the steps below:

1. Create the destination articles in the help center first
   • Publish each articles, so the destination uniform resource locator, also known as URL, exists
     • Complete the publication of all articles before you apply redirects. This will ensure that all destination pages exist
   • Build a map that pairs each source URL to a destination help center URL
2. Configure your mandatory redirects on your source host
   • Add 301 rules in your .htaccess file, for Apache and most servers

   • With other servers, use your server redirect settings or the control panel

     Tip: When you redirect your URLs:

     • Use individual URL or one-to-one redirect rules when possible and avoid redirect chains or loops
     • Use global redirect rules for broad patterns that apply across many URLs and ensure patterns are specific enough to avoid incorrect redirects
3. Test a sample of source URLs and confirm a 301 status and the correct destination
4. Update internal links on your source site to point to the destination pages and prepare your migration
5. After the redirects work, request a crawl
   • Use Google crawlers and fetchers to help crawl and index the destination pages
   • Zendesk has no influence on the frequency of Google crawlers, which are third-party products

For more documentation, see these articles:

• About search engine optimization (SEO) in the help center
• Redirect rules