One of the issues that comes up repeatedly is, what if we move or re-do our website?
If you change the name, or you change the page structure, either way pages that were there before will be missing.
That can affect your site’s effectiveness two ways:
- People clicking on links from other websites, from bookmarks or from search results where indexes haven’t updated yet, could find themselves with “404 errors” (page not found) or routed to the site’s home page, depending on how your site is set up.
- The search engine rankings could potentially drop.
Luckily, these are well-known issues with established solutions.
You want to use what is called “301 redirects.” With these, you can redirect browsers AND the search engines where you want them go.
You can do this for the whole site and for specific pages as well.
Google in particular has stated that if you use a 301 redirect, you’ll pretty much preserve the page rankings and search engine rankings the old pages or site had. And we’ve verified that with our own experience moving or rebuilding sites.
This is vital.
