How often have you followed a link on a website, to be hit with that old favourite, a 404 “Page Not Found” screen. A user’s usual response to this is to click back and head off elsewhere on a different route. Whilst this can certainly be a bad thing to lose possible human viewers of your website, when a search engine follows such a link, it can be very bad indeed as you have just lost a potential inbound link to your site which - depending on how important the linking site is - can greatly help to increase the ranking value of your own site.
Web links get lost or become redundant all the time for a whole variety of different reasons on the web. Some such examples include changing domain names (during company rebranding for example), upgrading a website (which often leads to page names and URLs changing), and simply removing old content from a site. Dynamic web technologies (where web pages do not necessarily physically exists, and are instead server up by using information from a database) can really exacerbate the problem where a change to the name or the way a single page works can result in hundreds or even thousands of these “lost links”.
The solution to this problem comes from a technique known as HTTP redirects. Put simply, it’s a way of telling a browser or search engine that the page they are looking for has moved, and provides them with the new place to look. There are two types of redirects that can be used: a 302 redirect which specifies that the change of location is only temporary, and a 301 redirect which states that the change is permanent. Only a 301 redirect will be result in a search engine successfully transferring any ranking power from the old link to the new link.
Whilst keeping track of all the dead and changed url’s on your site and putting appropriate 301 redirects in is an essential practice, if done incorrectly it can end up not working at all as desired. A common practice I see is for a webmaster to redirect Url A to Url B when the page name was changed. Then some time later, when Url B was also changed, another redirect is set up pointing from Url B to Url C, and once again later from Url C to Url D. Now you have in place a redirect chain where a search engine crawler looking for Url A has to end up requesting 4 different Urls before actually getting any content. It’s very likely that most search engines simply won’t do this and will just drop Url A from their index. However, Url A might have some decent link equity, which is now lost. It’s important then to try and keep on top of the redirects that have been created within your site and keep them regularly updated.
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4MAT’s flagship dotVacancy3 platform uses an advanced redirects manager tool to both allow management of new and old redirection instructions, and in many cases to automatically maintain and update these redirects to avoid the kind of redirect chain outlined above. It would be worthwhile checking that your own recruitment web software does the same.
Do not underestimate the value to your business of web links created to your site many years ago, you simply never know who’s looking at them, or what ranking value they’re giving you.
