Fuzzy Match in Excel: A Game-Changer for Website Migrations

If you're tired of spending hours manually matching URLs during a website migration or setting up 404 redirects, consider using Fuzzy Lookup in Excel. This powerful tool can significantly reduce the time and effort required for this task.

Redirect mapping automation is an attractive option, especially when considering the time it takes to familiarize yourself with a new site's categories and products/services. Manually matching two URLs every thirty seconds may seem manageable, but it's a tedious process that can take up to eight hours for a website with 1,000 URLs.

Fuzzy Lookup offers a more efficient solution. By using its fuzzy matching algorithm, you can quickly identify similar URLs without sacrificing accuracy. The tool provides a similarity score that ranges from zero (no match) to one (perfect match). This score is easy to understand, making it simple to gauge the accuracy of your matches.

To get started with Fuzzy Lookup, simply visit the download page and install the add-in on your machine. Unfortunately, this tool is currently only available for Windows users, so Mac users will have to look elsewhere for now.

When setting up Fuzzy Lookup, be sure to trim the domain (or staging site equivalent) from the URLs to ensure that the similarity score isn't altered by commonalities. It's also important not to venture below a 0.5 to 0.6 similarity threshold, as results may not be consistent enough for a site migration or 404 redirects purpose.

In this post, we'll explore the setup instructions and hands-on applications of Fuzzy Lookup in Excel, helping you make the most of this powerful tool for SEO. Whether you're working on a website migration or setting up 404 redirects, Fuzzy Lookup can help streamline your process and save you time and effort.

Fuzzy match excel mac