Quick Concepts
I’ve seen some really huge amounts of traffic squandered just because a company doesn’t do redirects on their website when they relaunch… If the URL’s on your website change at all… when you change your site…
You HAVE to do Redirects
– Catalog all the existing URL’s in a spreadsheet
– Write down the new ones
– Htacess redirects or SEO Redirection Plugin
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.htaccess redirection code snippet:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.yoursite.com/newpage.html
Redirect 301 /oldpage2.html http://www.yoursite.com/folder/
WordPress Plugin route: https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-redirects
Full Transcription
Hey, how’s it going? It’s Tim Brown, and this is another episode of “Google Likes It.” And today we’re going to be talking about how Google Likes It when you do 301 redirects when you relaunch your website. A 301 redirect just means you’re telling Google, and other links to your website if something moves. If a page moves or the URL changes (the little thing up in the bar up top) you need to tell Google and other links from around the web (that already exist out there) where it is now. Just so they don’t get there and get your ‘resource not found page.’ That’s a big deal when you’re relaunching a website, and I’ve seen it go horribly wrong. I’ve seen companies not redirect their best blog post when they redirect their site. Or, not redirect a landing page that had a bunch of links from around the web to it. And so, all that link juice, all that authority goes to waste, and if the best post on your site didn’t get redirected; there’s a huge problem because you’ll lose that traffic. And you’re not going to get it back half the time, so you want to make sure these redirects are in place. I’m going to give you the three steps to make sure that is the case, and that everything is covered before you relaunch your website.
1) Catalog the existing URLs on a spreadsheet
2) Write down the new URL next to the old URL if those have changed at all
3) Do .htaccess redirects or use the SEO Redirection plugin on Wordpress to make sure those are in your website and working
So, I’m going to leave a little bit of code in the description of the video if you’re going to do it through .htaccess and a link to that plugin, and I hope you join me next week for another episode of “Google Likes It.”
