Shopify 301 redirects live pages problem

[Alex423]

I am currently planning to migrate my website from another CMS to Shopify, and I am facing challenges with managing URL redirects due to the nature and volume of the URLs involved. My existing site, has numerous URLs that include various parameters, leading to a large number of duplicates, many of which are indexed in Google. Here are some examples of the types of URLs I'm dealing with:

• https://www.domain-name.com/products.html?&&url=18k-gold&filter_set[]=80&&money=USD

The main challenge is that I have hundreds of product pages, with each of these pages potentially having multiple parameter variations, cumulatively resulting in thousands of URLs.

I am looking for a way to manage redirects efficiently within Shopify, especially needing support for regular expressions to handle the complexity and quantity of these URLs. I understand that Shopify natively does not support 301 redirects for 'live' pages, and I am interested in any solutions you might recommend for internal redirects or any apps that could facilitate this process.

Could you please advise on the best practices or tools available within Shopify that could handle such a scenario? If Shopify's standard functionality is not suitable, I would appreciate any recommendations for third-party services or apps that integrate well with Shopify and can provide the required functionality.

SC Easy Redirects plugin and other same plugins, I've determined that it does not meet my requirements due to its limitations in handling the specific complexities of my scenario.

The primary issue is a plugin does not support 301 redirects for 'live' pages within Shopify, nor does it allow for the use of regular expressions in creating redirect files. This was confirmed by their support team. 

Shopify support suggested that I can write custom scripts for redirects using, for example, JavaScript. I admit that this will work, but it is a serious mistake on the part of SEO and page indexing. It is necessary to make exactly 301 redirects in order not to kill organic traffic (those who know will understand).

I ask those who have encountered the same thing to give advice on solving this problem. 

Thanks everyone.

[Alex423]

To be honest, I’m puzzled that no one answers the question, is it really that non-standard or complex? I believed that Shopify was the world leader in terms of CMS systems and took SEO very seriously. But not being able to set up a 301 redirect when migrating from another CMS to Shopify.... This is very strange.

[Dirk]

Hey, @Alex423 

I recommend going through our extensive guide on URL Paramaters and how it affects SEO as this will give you insight on how they work, how search engines like google have done a better job recognizing common paramaters and understanding how to treat them. Additionally, it will give you some actionable steps you can take to solve some paramater-based SEO issues. Overall, it's a very handy resource to have when it comes to this area of SEO and URLs. Definitely recommend bookmarking it!

If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know.

[KieranR]

Shopify has a pretty simple built-in redirect management system. But it sounds like what you're attempting is possibly overkill.

I can't understand why this can't be a standard SEO migration and redirect map, with a simple redirect file upload to Shopify.

Normally you'd just redirect 1-to-1, any URLs that:

• were getting GSC clicks or impressions
• were getting GA4 (or other web-analytics tools) landing sessions
• have backlinks pointed at them

Can you give some examples of paths you're trying to redirect? Or if you share the existing site URL could take a look.

[Alex423]

Hello Kieran.

Here is an example of the real URL - https://www.solvar.com/products/gold-and-silver-diamond-claddagh-ring-s2903.html?filter_set[]=2362,2....

As you can see, we have parameters in the URL and different numbers of URL could be in Google index.

[KieranR · Accepted solution]

Redirects seem straightforward enough. 

Like I said just grab a list of:

• the important URLs (clicks, traffic, link, old sitemap based)
• the new migrated URLs on Shopify

Then create a redirect map 1-to-1. Quick look in a few tools (Ahrefs, search dorks) tell me there will only be a few hundred URLs. 2k max at a guess. Not that big of a migration project.

Create a redirect map, upload to Shopify, done.

^ samples tested work fine.

You don't need to worry about the n-th degree of parameterized URL variations that were never getting any clicks or crawls. If you can create some bulk rules in Excel sheet great, but I wouldn't worry about them from an SEO pov.

The only (minor) problem I did see was the old site has URLs under /products.html&&url=xyz - which is technically a 'live' page (/products is a reserved URL path in Shopify). This might be the one you mentioned? Although I only saw 18 URLs with any visibility under that pattern, no detectable traffic so shouldn't be that big of a deal to skip, would suggest sanity check against GSC data.