What's happening at OcularCMS^®

We are very proud to announce something new to the platform that even wordpress.com does not have--unlimited custom 301 redirects for transferring equity from old site pages to new pages. This new feature has huge implications for both website owners and SEO providers alike.

There are many advantages to using a hosted platform over self-hosting on your own hosting account. However, with the many conveniences and features also come some trade-offs that may or may not be important to your particular website needs. For example, if a website is self-hosted on a stand-alone hosting account, there are no technical limitations to transferring link equity from old URL's to new ones. This is a crucial step when redesigning a website in order to maintain SEO equity from old page URL's to new (ex, about-us.html => about-us). In order to do this on a self-hosted account, all you need is someone who can handle the technical configuration (which can actually be quite difficult and dangerous if you don't know what you're doing). However, with a hosted platform, you share a lot of core functionality of the platform with other sites. And traditionally, you can't configure these core components of a hosted platform the same way as self-hosted websites because of restrictions to files like .htaccess. And this is why platforms like wordpress.com only allow you to redirect domain names to other domains and not individual pages to other individual pages.¹ And in fact, the best they can do for redirecting individual pages is to make a guess, assuming the URLs are similar to each other.² Otherwise, there is no redirect whatsoever and the equity for the page(s) is lost.

But we are happy to announce that we have developed a way to blend the best of both worlds into one. You have the freedom that .htaccess files offer, but without actually compromising security by allowing access to the file. Plus there is zero technical knowledge required. Simply create a redirect with a few clicks in the control panel and that's it!

To set up redirects right now, or if you're planning on redesigning your site, contact us for further instructions.


¹ source wordpress.com
² source wordpress.com