Just Search Blog
Just Search Blog
One of the questions that can often arise when rebuilding a website or restructuring one, is what do you do with your old pages? There will be many pages that have relevant equivalent pages to redirect to; however there may be many old pages that now have no equivalent. You may have stopped selling products or decided to focus elsewhere.
Many people believe that the best way to deal with this issue is to implement 301 redirects from the old URLs to the homepage. Say, for example, you sell lawn mowers and on your old site you sold petrol lawn mowers. Now, you have decided not to sell petrol lawn mowers, for one reason or another. This is the point where many people would 301 redirect the page to the homepage. The problem we have with this is that the homepage may not necessarily be relevant for petrol lawn mowers, especially if you no longer sell them.
Tedster, a webmaster world administrator, claims that it can actually hurt your site to do mass 301s. He says:
“I know of several websites that got into ranking trouble by 301 redirecting many pages to home (or a top level page of some kind) instead of returning a 404 or 410.
“It doesn’t pay to squeeze on the PR too tightly. I’d say look for important backlinks that point to problematic pages and create appropriate content at the same URL – even if it’s just an explanation about the change to the website.”
In our opinion it would be more beneficial to your website to 301 redirect an old URL to a new one IF the page is still relevant. If it isn’t, don’t redirect it to your homepage but instead 404 the page and make sure you use 404 pages to their full capacity. If you are not aware of the benefits of custom 404 pages, here is a quick breakdown:
Within Google Webmaster tools you will find the option to create custom 404 pages. These custom 404 pages allow the 404 page to display the template of your website with only the content area changing.
You will find on many of these templates the message “page not found” or “this page has moved” or something very similar. The main point of this page is that is allows you to add a search feature and so when someone navigates to the page and they see that it no longer exists, they then have the option to go to pages that do exist rather than leaving the site altogether.
The main thing to remember with custom 404 pages is like the name says, it is custom and so it allows you to tailor it to suit your users. Using your analytics data, find out which of your pages are most visited and relevant and then provide links within the navigation. It is more a case of usability and user experience, however will allow your users the option of going to other pages within the site rather than leaving due to having no other alternative.
Rob Bromilow
SEO Programmer
Manual link building is a process that has many advantages over automated link submission services. This blog post will look into the best process for manually achieving the links your website needs in order to compete in any market. SEO is heavily reliant on good quality, relevant links and this is what manual link building is all about.
Manual link building includes the following list, but this is not exhaustive:
There are pros and cons to manual link building however, and it is not a process that can be tailored to every website or industry. It is often most effective utilised in a competitive market where extra high quality links will make more difference.
For example, in less competitive markets it may benefit your website to have lots of directory submissions, lower quality links basically. This will give you a good standing in your market. However if your website is in a highly competitive market like finance then the lower quality will make little to no difference to your rankings. This is where manual link building can be the difference for your site.
Having someone manually go to relevant websites and enquire about good quality links, liaise on price and length of contract can often be the difference between being stuck on page 2 and getting onto page 1 of Google.
Pros of manual link building:
The advantages of manual link building are that the links gained are generally:
Cons of manual link building:
The disadvantage is that links are not guaranteed, performing link building in some markets is far easier than others. Due to the nature of the manual link building process, it is almost impossible to guarantee a number of links.
As a general rule of thumb it is important to look at your competition, work out where your site is weaker than your competition and then act accordingly. SEO Moz’s Linkscape tool and the Open Site Explorer tool offer a service that lets you find competitors links and analyse the quantity and quality of such links.
Establishing a budget and choosing your keywords that you hope to achieve for are essential in manual link building to provide a return on investment (ROI). Some clients will prefer consultation on the link building whereas some will prefer you to gain the links as well as find them. It is an open process that is aimed at finding the best option for each client.
Once you have your data you can look into details such as the page authority, domain authority, PageRank, anchor text and brand usage in keywords etc. All this information against your competitors shows you what you are missing and where your website needs to improve.
By the end of your manual link building process you would hope to have the following:
Authors: Rob Bromilow, Julie Cheung and Kenneth Berkley.
Web Design, Internet Marketing and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for the UK and World