Redirects

The Redirects tab (in the Search & Marketing group) decides what happens when someone opens an address your site no longer uses — a renamed page, a deleted post, or a URL from the site you had before you moved your domain to Genesis.

A redirect reaches your live site within about a minute of saving. You don’t need to publish again.

Why it matters

Without a redirect, an old address doesn’t show an honest “not found”. It opens your site with an empty page inside it, and search engines treat that as a live page. The old URL keeps its place in search results, the links other sites made to it lead nowhere, and your new page has to earn its ranking from scratch.

A redirect fixes that in one of two ways:

You choose	Visitors	Search engines
A new address	Are sent straight to the new page. Any tracking parameters in the link (?utm_source=…) are kept.	Move the old address’s ranking to the new one over a few weeks (301 — moved permanently).
The address is gone	See a “not found” page.	Drop the address from results (410 — gone), faster than an ordinary 404.

Add a redirect

1. Old address — the address that stopped working, e.g. /old-page or /blog/old-post. You can paste the whole URL from your browser; only the path is kept.
2. New address — click the field and choose one of your pages or posts from the list, or paste any link, including one on another website.
3. Click Add redirect.

To retire an address instead, open the New address list and choose the first item, Nothing replaces it — the address is gone. The button changes to Mark as gone.

Tip

Sending old addresses to your home page is tempting, but search engines treat that as a missing page — the ranking is lost either way. The panel warns you when you do it. If there’s no real replacement, mark the address as gone instead.

The panel also warns you when the new address is a path where none of your pages or posts lives — otherwise the redirect would lead to a missing page. Check the address before saving. (Some pages, like blog category pages, aren’t in that list, so for them the warning can be safely ignored.)

Redirects Genesis adds for you

You don’t have to remember to add a redirect when you change a URL yourself:

• Renaming a page or a blog post adds a redirect from the old address to the new one.
• Deleting a page or a post marks its address as gone.

These show up in the list with A rename or A deletion next to them, and you can edit or remove them like any other.

Manage the list

Each row reads old address → new address, with the status and who added it underneath. Point at a row to see its actions:

• View — opens the old address on your live site, so you can check the redirect works.
• Edit — change either address in place.
• Remove — the old address goes back to whatever your site shows there. A removed redirect can’t be restored; add it again if you need it.

A search box appears once you have more than ten redirects.

When Genesis asks before saving

• The address already redirects somewhere. You’ll be asked whether to Replace it or Keep existing.
• A page or post of your site is live at that address. Redirecting it takes that page off your live site for visitors and search engines (the page itself stays in your project), so you’re asked to confirm.
• You try to mark a live page as gone. That isn’t allowed — visitors would still see the page. Delete the page instead; its address is marked as gone automatically.

Move many addresses at once (CSV)

Use Import and Export at the top of the list.

Import takes a CSV file from your computer — for example a Google Sheets or Excel sheet saved as CSV, or a list of URLs exported from your old website or from Google Search Console:

Old address,New address
/blog/old-post,/blog/new-post
/old-page,https://partner.com/landing
/retired-page,

• Two columns: the old address, then the new one. Leave the second column empty to mark the address as gone.
• The header row is optional. Commas, semicolons and tabs all work as separators.
• Full URLs are fine — only the path is kept.
• Up to 500 rows per file.

Before importing you can choose to replace redirects that already exist for these addresses, and to also redirect addresses where a live page or post is today. After the import you get a result for every row — added, replaced, or skipped and why — which you can download as a CSV, fix, and import again.

Export downloads every redirect in the same format, so you can edit the list in a spreadsheet and import it back.

Moved your domain from another website?

When your domain starts pointing at Genesis, every address your old website used stops working at once — often dozens of blog posts. To keep what they earned in search:

1. Collect the old addresses — from your old site’s sitemap, from Google Search Console → Pages, or from your old blog.
2. Put them in a CSV. Give the posts you rewrote in Genesis their new address, and leave the rest empty so they’re marked as gone.
3. Import the file, then check a few rows with View.
4. In Google Search Console, submit your new sitemap (https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) so Google re-reads the site sooner.

Good to know

• Your sitemap stays clean. From your next publish, addresses you redirect are left out of your sitemap and your blog’s RSS feed, so search engines never see an address listed there that then redirects.
• Redirects survive publishing. Publishing again never brings an old page back at a redirected address.
• Update your own links too. A redirect covers links you forgot, but search engines prefer direct links — point your menus and buttons at the new address.
• The home page can’t be redirected. It’s the one address your site always has to answer.
• Up to 5,000 redirects per site.
• Redirects belong to your main site. A secondary app in the same project can store them, but they start working only once that app can publish on its own.