We do things based of several reasons. There are several reasons why website owners may decide to redirect their URL or entire domain to a new one. Some of the reasons include, but not limited to the following;

#1 To change to a new domain entirely

One of the first reason why you may need to redirect your contents is when you want to change to a new domain entirely. For example, the domain www.worldscholarshipforum.com was redirected to www.kiiky.com. As such, you may see lots of contents on Google with the worldschorshipforum link, but when you click on it, it takes you to kiiky. When this is done, you would not lose any of the contents on your website, neither will you lose any of the visitors that were supposed to come to your website.

There are some contents you may want to read and when you click on the link, it gives you any of these two feedback messages, “page not found” or “the content has been moved”. These 2 feedback messages comes when the location of a content was changed without redirecting the URL or when the content is entirely deleted. It could also happen when the domain has been lost. As a result of that, it becomes very necessary to always redirect your website.

#2 To change the location of a post

The second reason why you may need to redirect is to change the location of content to another website. You may create a new website and as such, want to reduce the contents on the old one. Instead of completely deleting them from the old website, you can redirect them to the new one website. With this, the location of the contents will be on the new websites, despite the fact that they were initially published on the old one.

#3 As the need to grow arises

As the need to grow arises, the need to redirect websites will be eminent. Using the example of worldscholarshipforum above, the website was initially launched as nigerianuniversitiesscholarship.com. This domain name created a limitation of limiting the contents to only Nigerianuniversitiesscholarships. With this, the website may not be able to grow as expected. Thus, the entire website was redirected to worldscholarshipforum.com to help them grow and expand. With the new name, the limitation of Nigeria was broken. They could now talk about anything scholarship. Yet, for further expansion, it was again redirected to kiiky.com. On kiiky currently, almost everything is found there. This is why you would need to redirect your website. Everybody wants to grow in his/her business.

#4 To still retain relevance and get links

If you have a new website and want to move your contents from the old one. Ensure you do not make the same kind of mistake I made. If you do, you will be faced with the challenge of having to build a new website from scratch. You will agree with the fact that building a website from the scratch is not honeymoon. Irrespective of your technical know-how, you will still undergo stress and unwanted stuffs.

Also, getting backlinks and google indexing will not be easy for you. If you lose all these in your former website, you have lost a lot. As such, redirection comes when you need to retain your relevance and links. Your old website has started growing already, ensure you do not lose such growth. As at the point of writing this content, none of my posts has been ranked on Google first page. This was the privilege I enjoyed in my other website which I carelessly lost, getting it back is not easy at all.

#5 In the case of merger and acquisition

As a sign of growth, you may need to merge you website with another or even acquire an already existing website. Neil Patel recommended that one of the ways to get quality backlinks to your website is by acquiring high quality websites and the merging it with yours. This was why SemRush acquired Backlinko. With this acquisition, Semrush would be getting about 500,000 additional visitors per month. This is made possible because backlinko has been redirected as a subdomain to Semrush. Same thing happened when Microsoft acquired Linkedin and Lynda.com. Today, Lynda.com no longer exists as a standalone website but has been integrated to linkedin.

#6 To decongest your website

Your website may be crowded with lots of unrelated contents. It is possible to have a single website talking of almost everything. This actually is not in the best practice for website owners (except in rare cases). As such, you may actually need to decongest your main website and split it into smaller units. Therefore, if this is what you want, instead of building a new website and publishing contents on it, you could choose to build a new website and then redirect some links to it. This will help you a great deal. When you do this, you bigger website will be broken into smaller units for ease management and niche focus.

These are some of the reasons why you need to redirect your website or a specific URL. When any of these scenarios arises, ensure you do not make the careless mistake I made back then.
SOURCE: Infoducation