“With so many professionals paying so much attention and money to SEO efforts,” says Jeff Blum of MBA Depot, “I am shocked by a huge mistake I see made repeatedly—site redesigns that break old links.”
You’ve earned links by producing good content, and each one comes with plenty of dividends. “It drives visitors, enhances your site’s reputation and contributes to enhanced search engine results,” he notes.
“Broken links destroy all those benefits. If a web page is valuable enough for someone to link to, then it is valuable enough to maintain.”
Doing so takes little effort, even when migrating to a new technology platform. According to Blum, any competent webmaster can handle the task—all you need is a small script for 301 redirects that alert search engine spiders to a permanent move.
And during the transition, Blum recommends, pay close attention to 404 pages.
“This might be overkill,” he notes, “but could be useful in the days following a redesign. By monitoring 404 pages, you won’t have to rely on visitors to point out your broken links.”
The Point: When you redesign your site, remember the importance of maintaining established connections with other sites. “[Ensure] that once a page is created and publicly available it remains that way,” says Blum.
Source: MBA Depot. Click here for the full post.
Want to be sure this is handled on your site, but not sure how? We include monitoring of those 404 errors with our hosting stats package and will routinely create internal “redirects” to make sure your old links return a valid page. This is not just good Search Engine Ranking practice, it’s good marketing to be sure your visitor gets what they came for. –BG
