Managing Website Growth with Yoast SEO Redirect Manager and Internal Linking

To manage website growth effectively using Yoast SEO, the Redirect Manager and Internal Linking features play crucial roles.

Yoast SEO Redirect Manager (available in Yoast SEO Premium) helps you avoid 404 errors by automatically creating and managing redirects whenever you move or delete content. This ensures users and search engines are redirected from old URLs to new ones, maintaining a healthy site structure and improving SEO rankings. It supports various redirect types (301, 302, 307, 410, 451) and advanced options like Regex redirects for bulk URL changes, which is useful for large-scale site restructuring or migrations.

For example, when you delete a page or change its URL, Yoast SEO prompts you to set a redirect to a relevant page or mark it as deleted, preventing dead-ends and improving user experience. Redirects can be managed easily from the WordPress dashboard under Yoast SEO → Redirects.

Internal Linking complements redirects by ensuring that links within your site point directly to the correct, updated URLs rather than relying on redirects. This is important because internal links that point to old URLs cause unnecessary redirects, which can slow down page load times and dilute SEO value. SEO teams often prefer updating internal links to the new URLs directly rather than relying on redirects for internal navigation.

In practice, when migrating or restructuring a website:

• Use Yoast SEO Redirect Manager to handle all old URLs and prevent 404 errors.
• Update internal links in your content to point directly to the new URLs to optimize site speed and SEO.
• For large sites, consider scripts or tools to automate updating internal links, as Yoast does not provide a built-in function to return new URLs from old ones programmatically.

Together, these tools help scale your website growth by maintaining SEO health, improving user experience, and ensuring search engines properly index your updated content structure.