Redirect old articles to a new permalink

If you change the permalink of an article, anyone who's bookmarked the old link or has been given that old permalink in an email or marketing materials will receive a 404 error.

Instead of that unpleasant experience, use the article's Old Links to 301 redirect retired permalinks and articles to a new location. Refer to Old Links use cases for more detailed explanations of when you might want to use this feature.

You have two options for using old links:

Turn on a setting so that when you change a permalink and save the article or category, we'll prompt you to automatically add the previous permalink as an old link. Refer to Automatically redirect when you update an article's URL for more information on this feature.
Add old links manually: Refer to the instructions on this page.

The information below varies based on whether you're using our 2026 new editor or old editor.

To figure out which instructions to follow:

Open any article for editing.
If the lefthand navigation is collapsed and there's a link near the top of the page to Switch to old editor, follow the New editor documentation.
If the lefthand navigation is expanded and the top of the editor and the righthand column have a heavier grey background, follow the Old editor documentation.

Here are side-by-side examples of the new editor and the old editor:

Sample New editor

Sample Old editor

Try out the new editor
We'd love your feedback on the new editor. To switch to the new editor, open any article for editing and select the Switch to new editor link at the top of the editor.

Manually add an Old Link in the new editor

To manually add an Old Link in the new editor:

Open the article in the editor.
Hover over the Permalink and select the triple dot ... (more) icon that appears.
Select Add old links from the more menu:

Select the triple dot menu next to the permalink, then select Add old links

The Old links modal opens.
Enter the Old links that should redirect to this article. These should be relative permalinks, so they should only include the portion that comes after your knowledge base homepage. For example, if I'm setting up a redirect for https://support/knowledgeowl.com/help/remove-home-page-title, I'd enter remove-home-page-title as my Old link.
Once you've finished entering your old permalinks, select Save in the Old links modal.
Be sure to Save your article.

Manually add an Old Link in the old editor

To manually add an Old Link in the old editor:

Open the article or category in the editor.
Select the Old Links hyperlink at the top of the editor:
Sample Old Links link
The Redirect Links modal opens.
Enter the Old Permalinks that should redirect to this new article. These should be relative permalinks, so they should only include the portion that comes after your knowledge base homepage. For example, if I'm setting up a redirect for https://support/knowledgeowl.com/help/remove-home-page-title, I'd enter remove-home-page-title as my Old Permalink.
Once you've finished entering your old permalinks, select Update Redirects to save those redirects.
Save your article or category in the editor.

Troubleshooting: Only valid URL slugs are allowed warning

The Redirect Links modal may display one of these warnings:

Only valid URL slugs are allowed. Any invalid characters will be stripped upon save.

Your link has invalid URL slug characters which will be removed on save.

This warning means you entered a URL that contains unsupported permalink characters, which usually means you tried to enter a full URL instead of just the article permalink.

To resolve the warning, review the Old links you've entered and be sure they're using the article's permalink only (like remove-home-page-title) instead of the full URL (like https://support/knowledgeowl.com/help/remove-home-page-title).

Use cases

Old links let you redirect permalinks for old/outdated links to a current article. There are two primary use cases for old links:

When you've written a new article that "replaces" an existing article. Keep reading for more on this use case.
When you've updated an article's permalink due to title or content changes. Use the Automatically redirect when you update an article's URL setting to handle this use case!

Replace an existing article

Linus, our trusty owl, has written an article called Giving a hoot about knowledge, and the permalink was something like:

https://support.knowledgeowl.com/help/giving-a-hoot-about-knowledge

After that article was published, his marketing team used that permalink in a public blog post on owls and wisdom.

Now, let's suppose that Linus has since written a new and better version of this content called Docs or it didn't happen:

https://support.knowledgeowl.com/help/docs-or-it-didnt-happen

But Linus isn't sure all the places out in the wide world that referenced that giving a hoot article. And what if it was so brilliant that other people also referenced it, linked to it, or bookmarked it?

Old links to the rescue! Instead of trying to track down every instance of the original permalink for Giving a hoot about knowledge, Linus can set Giving a hoot about knowledge to a deleted status and enter the giving-a-hoot url as an old link for Docs or it didn't happen. When people try to go to the giving-a-hoot URL, we'll auto-redirect them to docs-or-it-didnt-happen instead.

For this type of Old Links use case, the old article you wan to redirect must be in some type of Draft, Archived, or Deleted publishing status. Refer to Publishing status to learn more about the available publishing statuses.