After announcing our updated blog importer back in September, we got a lot of positive feeback about our ability to seamlessly (301) redirect requests for existing URLs of imported content to their new home on Squarespace. This practice ensured that all the Google link juice users had acquired over time was transferred directly to their Squarespace site in a SEO friendly way. Until today, this feature only lived in the deep recesses of our back-end routing code, but we're excited to now bring this feature out of the dark, and allow our users to create their own SEO friendly shortcuts.
Before this new release, users were only able to create URL shortcuts to their site's content via a simple URL rewriting method. Unfortunately, this method made the same content show up at multiple locations, thereby splitting the page rank and other measures of link value between the URLs. From an SEO perspective, this was obviously a bad thing.
We're particularly excited about this new release because it was 100% user-driven. This feature is something our users have been requesting on the forums and in support tickets in ever-increasing numbers (you know who you are, ticket #167141!). So, in the spirit of the season: users, consider this your present from the Squarespace Santa :)
For more information on how to use this new feature as well as more technical information on 301 and 302 redirects, please see this tutorial in our manual.