*Clarity In Marketing

Website projects increasingly involve updating or replacing existing sites. For our clients - and I'm sure everybody else's - producing sites that are 'search engine friendly' is an essential requirement. Yet many organisations risk loosing the search engine rankings and referring links from other sites that they have already built up. The result can be a significant drop in traffic and a long battle to reclaim your listings. Surprisingly, this can be easily and cheaply avoided by setting up '301 - Moved Permanently' and customised '404 - Not Found' error messages.

Where did my search engine ranking go?

In redeveloping your website it's likely that page names will change. For example, you may switch to 'natural language' page names which search engines prefer or you may revise your site navigation which may change the underlying naming structure. The only page that is unlikely to change is your home page www.MySite.co.uk.

Search engines will return the specific URLs they have indexed from your old site but when these are clicked the visitor will find the page no longer exists. Instead they will be presented with an error message saying '404 - Not Found'. Search engines will also periodically check the links they have indexed and if after a couple of attempts those pages are still missing they will remove them. At this point you loose your hard won rankings.

Similarly, sites linking in to you will remove links to missing pages and these may be even harder to re-establish. As the number and quality of inbound links to your site is an important evaluation criteria used by search engines, this can further lower your search engine rankings.

How to keep your search engine rankings

There are two simple steps that can help you to smooth the transition from old website to new. Firstly set up '301 - Moved Permanently' pages and secondly create a custom '404 - Not Found' page.

301 - Moved Permanently

A 301 error message simply tells the search engine that the page has moved and where the new one can be found. The search engine can then update it's index and should apply your previous rankings to the new page. The 301 error message also automatically redirects anyone clicking the old link to the new page so they seamlessly end up on the page they were expecting.

If you have a large site you may choose just to set up 301 - Moved Permanently messages for the pages indexed by the main search engines (Google, MSN and Yahoo!). To find out which pages they have indexed type site:www.MySite.co.uk into the search box.

Don't forget to include links from any referring sites or blogs. You should also contact the site owners and ask them to update the links to your new site. This may also be a good opportunity to get links to old information removed and new ones added.

Custom 404 - Not Found

Despite your best efforts it's likely that you'll miss a page or two and some content may no longer be relevant and not have a corresponding page on your new site.

The solution is to set up a custom '404 - Not Found' page. This is good practice weather you have a new website or not. Should a site visitor follow a broken or incorrect link or mistype one they will see an error message saying '404 - Not Found'. If you haven't set up a customised 404 page this will be a default page which won't be in your site style and in all likelihood will not be very user friendly. As a result your potential customer is likely to try one of your competitors' websites instead.

A custom '404 - Not Found' page on the other hand can follow your site style and branding and make it easy for the visitor to find what they were looking for by including links to popular content; a site search and your main navigation.

Beware that Microsoft's Internet Explorer will replace any 404 error page under 512 bytes with it's own 'friendly' version as it assumes any page under this is likely to be automatically generated and not very user friendly. So make sure your page is over 512 bytes but keep it simple.

Monitor your 404s

Once you have set up your custom 404 error page keep a close watch and set up 301 redirects for any missing pages that are frequently requested and notify the referring site.

Quick and simple to apply

Setting up 301 and 404 error pages is straight forward but does depend on the type of server you are using and the set up. Speak to your host, developer or webmaster and they should be able to advise you how to do it for your site or do it for you.

If you' are considering redeveloping your website and don't want to loose your existing site traffic, talk to Clarity In Marketing.