Redirect Automation Tool (SEO) - Home Depot

My Role

SEO Product Manager for HomeDepot.com, managing a scrum team of 6 SWE and working closely in collaboration with the Search Engine Marketing team.

Background

One of the challenges of SEO on a site as large as HomeDepot.com — one of the largest retailers in the world, with millions of active pages — is doing so at scale. Something as simple as creating and managing 301 redirects becomes a nightmare that requires a full team to manage. The Search Engine Marketing team created about 5,000 redirects per year, through a tedious process that represented an estimated 2,500 man hours to manage.

Previously, redirects were managed in a shared CSV file that would require regular submission to the engineering team to update on our servers. This was a fragile-and time consuming process, with multiple steps vulnerable to error.

Project

By building an in-house tool for creating and managing redirects, we could:

• Improve SEO Marketing team efficiency, saving thousands of hours that could be used for other optimization efforts

• Improve response times when a page needs to be redirected

• Empower the SEO Marketing team with better control over the way search engine bots crawl and index the site, improving traffic long-term

Implementation

We built a new in-house tool for managing redirects. Features included:

• Redirect list view - sortable and searchable

• Redirect creation and editing

• Bulk uploads and downloads for mass creating / editing redirects

• Change log to track when a redirect was updated and by who

• Bulk actions including mass delete

• Descriptions indicating the purpose of the redirect