I’m not sure what it is about the cobbler and his kid’s shoes, but man, it always rings true in my own business.
The things I let go on my own Web site I would never allow slip on a client’s site.
Kate’s husband Chris says he is the same way. He’s this amazing carpenter (he actually built a top notch bathroom for me). But he says that he doesn’t fix anything in his own house.
In my case, it’s with our Web site.
Let me say that I am very pleased with our new site. The front end is run on Joomla and the blog is run on WordPress. The titles on some of the pages on the main site could be a bit better… but that’s coming.
But one thing I didn’t do is a thorough redirect of old pages. This is something that is an absolute requirement when we are migrating a client’s Web site to a new platform.
But when it comes to my site…
Well today is the day I begin to fix it. And this is how I’m going to do it.
The reason this is so valuable is because if you fix broken links on your site that other people have linked to, it’s like instantly getting a brand new link to your site.
There are two ways you can go about this. One way is to put an actual page back up in the space where the old page existed. The other way is to set up a 3o1 redirect that sends people from the old url to the new url. There are a ton of resources online as how to do 301 redirects. Just do a search for it if you are interested. Or if you have questions post a comment here.
In my case, I had hundreds of pages that no longer exist. Determining which pages to either set back up or redirect is the secret to spending your time wisely.
Google Webmaster Central is the place to go to figure out which pages you should fix.
If you haven’t yet, I highly, highly, highly encourage you to get your site setup in Webmaster Central. There is a ton of great information you can learn about your site in there.
In this case, I am interested in looking at the “not found” report. It’s under “web crawl errors”. These are shown on the first page when you log in to your Webmaster Central account.
From there, just click on the “Details” link, if you have any “not found” urls. This report will show you each missing page and also the number of external links pointing to this missing page.
You want to start correcting the broken links that have the most external links pointing to them.
I would start fixing each page from most linked to, to least linked to.
Doing this is going to help your visitors that tried to get to a missing page and also will give you credit for all those links that didn’t have any pages associated with them.
This is a really easy and quick way to tighten up your site and give you some brand new links.
Most recent posts by Sage Lewis
- The new thing: Your customer - February 8th, 2012
- An Agency Is Not One Person - February 6th, 2012
- Don't End Up Like Saddam Hussein - February 3rd, 2012
- 3 Points I Want To Make At My OMS Workshop #OMS12 - February 1st, 2012
- How to double the size of your company in one year - January 30th, 2012
