Swan features

Every migration usually starts by discovering the URLs of the website with a piece of software called a crawler. Just like Google, it goes through all the URLs and the links inside your pages to discover the pages to include in the migration plan of your website.

Here you can merge as many websites as you like into a single target website with Swan, at no extra cost (only the largest website of the project counts towards your URL quota).

If you have access to the Google Search Console account, you can import the URLs of the linked website directly into Swan. A filtering step lets you exclude some URLs; these are the URLs from the Performance tab of Search Console.

If you do not have access to Google Search Console, you can of course import the same data into Swan manually.

Want to import URLs from a source that is not connected via API? Swan lets you import URLs with one of the following predefined tags, or use the custom tag (Ahrefs, Semrush, Search Console, Majestic, Babbar SEO, log analysis, priority).

The priority tag is there to protect URLs that must not be removed by a manual filter (parameter or URL pattern exclusion).

Many areas of the websites you want to migrate are common to the whole site and "pollute" the semantic analysis of each web page: the header, the footer and the automated internal linking areas.

That is why Swan lets you specify these areas so that they are excluded from the semantic calculation used to match URLs automatically.

This is the List or Crawl mode, as in Screaming Frog. This mode lets you disable URL discovery by crawling and work with imports only. It can be enabled from the start or during the project to stop new URLs from coming in.

The advantage of this mode is that you can migrate only part of a website (for example if you want to move a blog) or avoid a runaway number of crawled URLs when you work on a website with "spider traps" that generate endless URLs (this can be the case with facets when migrating an e-commerce website).

Not all URLs are always worth migrating in a project: sections with no SEO value, spider traps, parameters that generate duplicate URLs, etc. For all these cases, Swan lets you define either URL parameters or slug patterns to exclude, to filter the project's URLs better. You can of course also delete URLs by hand if you wish.

The tag system linked to imports lets you identify at any time, in the dashboard, the source of the URLs added to the project. You can also analyse them in the final CSV export of the URL redirects. Tags are useful at any time during the matching step, for example to give priority to redirecting URLs that receive backlinks.

For each URL, Swan suggests the most relevant URL from a semantic point of view. In principle it is the most relevant one in SEO terms, but the decision is yours: each time you can either pick one of Swan's 3 suggestions, redirect to the home page, set a 410 Gone, or choose in the search engine with autocomplete to go faster.

This feature is particularly appreciated by our users with multilingual websites. When URLs are added, Swan automatically detects the language the page is written in, in order to include it in a machine learning matching model for that language. The reporting system and the URL management screens let you see it and, if needed, reassign a URL to another language, during data acquisition, if the detection is not relevant. (This can happen when the page contains poorly translated content or content that is too technical in English, for example. When this happens, it is often an opportunity for our users to think about the semantic relevance of their pages.)

Do you have pages that are too similar semantically, or even a real internal duplicate content problem with only a few words of difference? No problem, that is what Swan is for. For example, if on your e-commerce website you can isolate the product reference in the body text or in the source code, Swan will automatically point it to the right URL based on that single piece of data. Feel free to contact us directly for a demo of this powerful advanced feature.

The syntax of redirect rules is hard to remember for non-specialists and can change from one hosting to another depending on whether it runs Apache or Nginx. That is why Swan offers a simple export with ready-made redirect rules based on the matches you have made.

Whether you have fine-tuned Swan to optimise its semantic calculation or you want to send all URLs to a single target, Swan lets you do it in fewer than 10 clicks. You can therefore complete a migration project of several hundred URLs in less than an hour with unmatched precision and quality.

Your redesign may be the opportunity to drop URLs that no longer make sense and are not meant to be redirected. That is why Swan lets you assign a 410 Gone code to these URLs, one by one or in bulk.

Having a redirect plan is good; making sure it works is better. That is why Swan lets you test all the URLs you have redirected on your staging environment, to confirm they are consistent with your redirect plan.

You can never be too careful! There may well be differences, in development, content or hosting, between the staging environment of your project and the live website. That is why you can also test the validity of your redirect plan on the final website.

For each redirect, the CSV export provided by Swan shows the acquisition source of the URL through its tag or tags. This export is therefore ideal for analysing the redirect plan at your own pace or for importing the list of URLs into a third-party tool.

You have access to clear and precise charts throughout the project to help you carry out your migration as accurately as possible.

Available charts include:

• Breakdown of the websites' URLs by tag and acquisition source
• List of URL parameters detected per website
• List of languages detected per website
• List of HTTP status codes detected per website
• Average similarity percentage detected for automatic URL matches
• HTTP status of redirected pages on staging
• HTTP status of redirected pages in production