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Do you know if your site has any broken links? Perhaps you’ve not bothered to check, or don’t see the importance. After all, if you’ve taken a page down, once it’s taken down, no one can access it can they, right? Wrong!
Broken links can drag down the performance of your website, impact on a user’s experience and most importantly, drive traffic to your competitors’ websites! So when you ‘just take a page down’, there’s quite a knock on effect, which could ultimately cost you sales.
Don’t get me wrong, if a page is out of date or you’re no longer stocking a certain product, you need to remove the page. However, there’s a right way and a wrong way of going about it.
Firstly, you need to find out if you’ve got any broken links on your site. There are a few ways you can check this:
1. Visit your Google webmaster tools account and see if Google is alerting you of any crawl errors (if you don’t have a Google webmaster tools account, you can sign up for one for free here). You can find out which links are broken/pages which have been removed and which pages contain links to those pages. From there you can update your current pages with links to new pages or remove the old/broken links from those pages entirely.
2. You can use one of the free broken link checking tools available, such as these:
Submit Express Broken Link Checker Tool
3. If you have a WordPress self-hosted website, WordPress has a broken link checking plugin.
So, how do you go about taking a page down with the minimum impact on your visitors and performance of your website?
Firstly, make sure you have a ‘404’ error page on your site. I’ve covered this in a previous post and there are some nice examples here. They are simple to set up and if there are broken links on your site, the visitor will be retained on your site – that’s extremely important. The last thing you want is for someone to perform a search, find one of your old pages still being served in the search results on Google or Bing, click on it, arrive at a dead end (‘this page does not exist’), hit the ‘back’ button, and visit your competitors’ websites instead. It’s important to remember that once you take a page down, it could still remain in the search engines’ database for some time to come, and this is why old pages still get served up in search results and why you need a 404 page.
Secondly, ask your webmaster to set up a 301 redirect from an old page to a relevant new or existing page. For example, if you decide to change or update some content onto a brand new page and want the old page to redirect to this newer, fresher page. It can work well for content sites, such as blogs, or if you sell products and a product has been updated and it makes sense to redirect an old product page to a newer version. Any links which may point to the old product or content page will be carried through to the new page with a 301 redirect, so if that old page happened to be popular, you won’t lose the link popularity you had. The search engines will be alerted to follow the redirect and index the new page. If you don’t have a replacement product or content that is relevant to the old page, then you could either redirect it to the home page or nearest relevant page of your site (so you don’t lose any link popularity) or direct people perhaps to newer products/content from your 404 page.
So, next time you’re updating your site and removing pages, give some thought to the impact it will have on your site and potentially your sales!
How do you keep your site updated and deal with updating products on your website?
About Sam
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
