05Websites and digital assetsCulture and entertainment
Biluim
a lifestyle magazine on a domain with a past
biluim.co.il
A Hebrew lifestyle magazine for couples and parents, with a gig board that updates itself, a comics corner, and a domain that got its history back.
669 old URLs brought back to life with permanent redirects
The challenge
The magazine already had over two hundred articles and no organic traffic. When I dug into the domain, it turned out it wasn't new at all: the Internet Archive has snapshots from 2003, and from 2008 to 2016 it hosted a Hebrew social network called "Biluim". Long standing Israeli sites still linked to the old addresses, and every one of them returned an error.
What I did
- Mapped the old addresses from the archive and built a permanent redirect map for 669 URLs, each sent to the closest topic on the new site: music to the Tel Aviv guide, movies to picking a date night film, trips to the romantic weekend guide.
- Brought all 205 articles into one structure: a short answer up top, an FAQ, a category, structured data for Google and internal links, with no orphan pages and no broken links.
- Built a gig board that pulls events every night from public ticketing and venue sources, after a legal review: facts only, my own description, and a link to the ticket seller.
- Split kids' events into a section of their own, by region, so they never mix with nightlife.
- Built a comics corner with a reader that flips pages in Hebrew reading direction.
The decision that made the difference
Treat the domain as an asset with a past, not a new site. A new site starts from zero. This one already had links from established Israeli sites that simply led nowhere. Instead of chasing new links, I brought the old ones back to life through the redirect map.
What came out of it
- The redirect map for the 669 old URLs is live and was verified on the site.
- As of September 6, 2026, 201 pages were indexed in Google.
- The gig board runs and refreshes every night.