Reclaim lost links to old pages?
-
We recently moved our site to a new CMS and did a complete redesign, with new content. It's really hit our SEO. Open site explorer is telling me there are lots of 404 web pages which were basically old product pages that no longer exist, since the way we have structured the site has changed. So is it worth trying to reclaim these links? If so, how can I do that without building pages at the URL - will a 301 redirect be enough?
-
Thanks, much appreciated!
-
Hi,
Here is a recently published a nice article on exactly same issue by Neil patel on 26th feb 15@ http://www.searchenginejournal.com/tactical-guide-making-old-pages-rank-google/124575/
I hope it helps
Thanks
-
Hi,
Yes - you absolutely should do this. As you said, 301 redirects would be the way to go as these pass almost all of the link juice to the page you redirect to. If there's not an easy way to add redirects using your CMS, you can use your .htaccess file but this is very powerful and can cause server issues. If you're unsure, ask your developers or better still, send them a list of old pages and where they should be redirected to implement them for you.
-
Redirect these pages with 301 to the corresponding new ones would be the easiest thing to do. It would even be better to try to contact the site owners and update the links, but I have to admit that this could be a enormous work and in some cases you have the risk that the link is removed rather than replaced.
rgds
Dirk
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Source page showsI have 2 h1 tags on my page. I can only find one.
When I grade my page it says I have more than one h1 tag. I view the source page and it shows there are two h1 headings with the same wording. If I delete the one h1 heading I can find, the page source shows I have deleted both of them. I don't know how to get to the other heading to delete it. And I'm off page one of google! Can anybody help? Clay Stephens
Moz Pro | | Coot0 -
Duplicate page report
We ran a CSV spreadsheet of our crawl diagnostics related to duplicate URLS' after waiting 5 days with no response to how Rogerbot can be made to filter. My IT lead tells me he thinks the label on the spreadsheet is showing “duplicate URLs”, and that is – literally – what the spreadsheet is showing. It thinks that a database ID number is the only valid part of a URL. To replicate: Just filter the spreadsheet for any number that you see on the page. For example, filtering for 1793 gives us the following result: | URL http://truthbook.com/faq/dsp_viewFAQ.cfm?faqID=1793 http://truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793 http://truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793&pf=true http://www.truthbook.com/blogs/dsp_viewBlogEntry.cfm?blogentryID=1793 http://www.truthbook.com/index.cfm?linkID=1793 | There are a couple of problems with the above: 1. It gives the www result, as well as the non-www result. 2. It is seeing the print version as a duplicate (&pf=true) but these are blocked from Google via the noindex header tag. 3. It thinks that different sections of the website with the same ID number the same thing (faq / blogs / pages) In short: this particular report tell us nothing at all. I am trying to get a perspective from someone at SEOMoz to determine if he is reading the result correctly or there is something he is missing? Please help. Jim
Moz Pro | | jimmyzig0 -
Percentage of good links vs. bad
Hi Does anyone know the best way of determining good links from bad links using the SEO Moz tools? I bought some directory links to two or three pages on my site a few years back. The were all very obviously spammy because of the anchor text and I didn't have a high enough ratio of good links to counteract them. I read somewhere that if more than 10% of the links to a page have the same (or similar) anchor text, it's obvious that you're on the bad list.
Moz Pro | | nsjadmin0 -
Page Authority Bulk Check?
Hi all, Was wondering if maybe using the SEOmoz API there was a way to check in excel the page authority of 500 URLs or more? Or is there a different way to do this? Thanks, Carlos
Moz Pro | | Carlos-R0 -
"Too many on-page links" warning on all of my Wordpress pages
Hey guys, I've got like 120 "Too many on-page links" warnings in my crawl diagnostics section. They're all the pages of my WordPress blog. Is this an acceptable and expected warning for Wordpress or does something need to be better optimized? Thanks.
Moz Pro | | SheffieldMarketing0 -
I have another Duplicate page content Question to ask.Why does my blog tags come up as duplicates when my page gets crawled,how do I fix it?
I have a blog linked to my web page.& when rogerbot crawls my website it considers tags for my blog pages duplicate content.is there any way I can fix this? Thanks for your advice.
Moz Pro | | PCTechGuy20120 -
4XX links in SEOmoz
My campaign is showing me that I have 7 4XX errors. Is there anyway to see where these pages are linked from in order to remove the links?
Moz Pro | | MirandaP0 -
SEOMoz Campaign shows Warnings for pages with >200 and <300 links
We currently use SEOMoz's campaign tool to review the SEO progress of our site. One thing we are unsure of is that SEOMoz gives us a warning for over 1000 of our pages because we have around 200 links on those pages (all in the Menu Drop Downs). I read the post and watched the video, Whiteboard Friday Flat Site Architecture a while ago and Rand mentioned there is no issue with having a web page with 200 to 300 links and he even encouraged it. So why would these show up as warnings in our Campaign?
Moz Pro | | PBCLinear0