Don’t Lose Your SEO! Automate 301 Redirect Mapping

When migrating a website to a new domain, setting up 301 redirects is crucial to maintain SEO rankings and prevent broken links. Manually mapping URLs can be time-consuming, but Python can help automate this process by extracting URLs from sitemaps and comparing them.

In this article, we’ll:

• Extract URLs from old and new sitemaps
• Compare them to identify matching patterns
• Generate an Excel file for easy 301 redirect mapping

🚀 Why 301 Redirects Matter

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirection from one URL to another. It helps preserve search engine rankings and ensures users are seamlessly redirected to the correct page on the new domain.

When migrating a website, the URL structure may change. Instead of manually mapping old URLs to new ones, we can automate the process by comparing sitemaps of both domains.

Non-members can access it here.

📌 Extracting URLs from a Sitemap

Sitemaps are XML files that list all the pages of a website. They are commonly found at:

https://example.com/sitemap.xml