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What redirects do

A redirect sends a visitor (and a search engine) who opens an old address to where the content lives now, with a real 301 Moved Permanently (or a 302). Use them to keep links working after you move to Halo, rename an article, or retire a page. Manage them at Help Center > Settings > Redirects. Redirects apply wherever your help center is served: every verified custom domain and the default /hc/{slug} address. They start working once the help center is live. A new or changed redirect can take up to a minute to apply.

Where redirects come from

A redirect that points at an article or collection follows it: rename the article again and the old address still lands on it. Deleting the article or collection removes its redirects. A redirect to an article that isn’t published is paused (shown as Not published) until you publish it, so visitors are never sent to a page that doesn’t exist. A redirect to a company-specific article is paused too (shown as Company-specific): that article’s address is shown only to visitors who can open it, and a redirect would show it to anyone who has the old link. Redirects to public and sign-in-required articles work as usual.

Old Intercom URLs

After an Intercom import, links such as /en/articles/10340439-install-the-pixel redirect to the article’s Halo address. Halo matches Intercom links by the article id, so the same article in another language (/fr/articles/10340439-...) or with an older title in the URL redirects too. Collection links (/en/collections/...) work the same way. This covers links on a domain that points at Halo, such as your own help.yourcompany.com. Links on intercom.help/your-workspace/... are served by Intercom, so Halo never sees them. For those, use Export CSV and load the list wherever that host’s redirects are managed, or update the links at their source.

Adding a redirect

  • Old path: the path on your help center, for example /en/articles/123-old-title. You can paste a full URL; only its path is kept. Matching ignores letter case, a trailing slash and the query string.
  • Goes to: a path on this help center (/articles/new-title, /billing) or a full https:// URL. When the path is an existing article or collection, the redirect is tied to it and follows later renames.
  • Type: 301 Permanent for content that moved for good, 302 Temporary otherwise.
Halo refuses a redirect that can’t work: a path that points at itself, two paths that point at each other, a Goes to path with . or .. segments, and an old path that ends in a static-file extension (.png, .jpg, .svg, .gif, .webp, .js, .css), because those are served as files and never reach the redirect. Adding a redirect for a path that already has one replaces it. The help center’s own pages (/search, /sitemap.xml, /robots.txt, /auth/...) and its home page can’t be redirected. A visitor’s query string (for example campaign parameters) is carried over to the new address. A redirect you add always wins for its exact path, even if a published article lives there. A redirect Halo created from a rename steps aside if you later publish a different article at that old address.

Importing a CSV

One redirect per row: old path, new path or URL, and optionally 301 or 302 (default 301). A header row is optional.
Rows that can’t be used are listed with their row number and the reason; the rest are imported. A file holds up to 5,000 rows, and a help center keeps up to 10,000 redirects.

Exporting

Export CSV downloads every redirect with five columns: from, to, status (the import format, so the file can be imported again), plus old_url (the full original URL, when the redirect came from an import) and new_url (the full address it resolves to today, on your custom domain when you have one). Use old_url and new_url to recreate the redirects on a host Halo doesn’t serve.

Hits

Each row shows how many times the redirect has been served. Browsers remember a redirect for a few minutes, so repeat visits from the same browser aren’t all counted.