Your help articles have Google rankings, backlinks, and domain authority you built over months or years. Changing platforms changes URLs, and without proper handling, all that equity evaporates.

With 301 redirects, it doesn't have to.

The Single Most Important Decision

Keep the same subdomain. If your help center lives at docs.example.com, build your new cStar-powered site on that same subdomain. All your backlinks and authority live there. Same subdomain means you only handle path changes, not a full domain move.

Build with the Headless SDK

The cStar Library API and LibraryClient SDK let you build a custom help center at any URL structure. The API serves article content; you control routing.

You're not locked into cStar's URL patterns. Serve articles at /docs/, /help/, /articles/, or even /hc/en-us/articles/ to match your old structure exactly.

Preserve Slugs During Import

When importing articles with the Universal Importer (Settings > Team > Import), map the source slug field to the cStar slug field. This keeps your URL-friendly identifiers consistent.

For Zendesk articles, the slug is the hyphenated title after the article ID: in /hc/en-us/articles/7253090768539-Installing-Something, the useful part is installing-something.

Set Up 301 Redirects

Every old URL needs a permanent redirect to its new URL.

Old: /hc/en-us/articles/7253090768539-Installing-Something
New: /articles/installing-something

How you implement this depends on your hosting:

  • Vercel -- Redirects in vercel.json (up to 1,024 rules). For more, use Vercel middleware.
  • Cloudflare -- Bulk redirects support up to 20,000 URL pairs on free plans. Upload a CSV.
  • SvelteKit -- Redirect logic in hooks.server.js that parses the old pattern and maps to the new path.
  • Next.js -- Middleware (middleware.js) for pattern-based redirects, or the redirects array in next.config.js for smaller sets.

Preserve Meta Descriptions

cStar articles support meta_description and excerpt fields. Map your existing meta descriptions during import to keep your search result snippets intact.

Submit Your Sitemap

cStar auto-generates a sitemap at /sitemap.xml with all published articles. After your new site is live:

  1. Open Google Search Console
  2. Add or verify your property
  3. Submit the new sitemap URL
  4. Monitor Index Coverage for crawl errors

Keep Redirects Permanent

There's no good reason to remove 301 redirects. External sites will link to your old URLs indefinitely. Leave the redirects in place.

Migration Checklist

  1. Export all articles from your current platform (include slugs, meta descriptions, published dates)
  2. Import into cStar via the Universal Importer (preserve slugs and metadata)
  3. Build your new help center using the LibraryClient SDK on the same subdomain
  4. Generate your redirect map (old URL to new URL for every article)
  5. Deploy redirects via your hosting platform
  6. Switch DNS from old platform to new site
  7. Submit the new sitemap to Google Search Console
  8. Monitor Search Console for crawl errors over the following weeks

What to Expect

With proper 301 redirects, rankings may wobble for a few weeks, then recover within a couple of months. Without redirects, expect 50-80% organic traffic loss that can take many months to claw back -- and some pages may never recover.

What cStar Provides for SEO

  • Custom slugs on every article
  • Meta description field
  • Schema.org JSON-LD structured data (automatic)
  • Open Graph and Twitter card tags (automatic)
  • Canonical URLs on every article
  • Dynamic sitemap at /sitemap.xml
  • Headless SDK for custom help centers at any URL structure
  • CORS-enabled API for cross-origin access
  • Timestamp preservation during import (article age signals carry over)