Site updates, 301 redirects, and link juice

Once a page on a web site has been published on the ‘net, and indexed by the major search engines, one of the LAST things you want to do is to remove that page! But that is often what happens when a site is “updated”… navigation is restructured and page names/URLs are changed to suit the new “look”.

Any existing links to that URL are gone for good! Traffic to that URL will end up nowhere! Any PR (Page Rank) that page had is lost forever.

And YOU LOSE!

Unless you use 301 redirects to change any requests for old pages to the new address!

A 301 redirect tells search engines that the page has been REPLACED by another one, so they should adjust their records/index to show the new page… Which means you will continue to get traffic to “old” pages… And (given time) even Google will “transfer” the page rank of the old page to the new one.

This is something which does concern me immensely at the moment as I upgrade Come On Aussie… The site is well established, with thousands of pages indexed, and the main “category” pages have a PR of 4 to 5 with lots of incoming links I just can’t afford to lose.

As an integral part of this update, I’m implementing 301 redirects to tell the search engines which pages have been replaced.

Quite simply, that means ANY requests for an old page (eg the old “Latest Australian Web Sites” page that was at /categories/new_sites.html) will end up at the newcorrect URL (of www.comeonaussie.com/new-sites)

How long does it take for Google to pass on the Page Rank for this old page?

I’m not too sure… and cannot seem to find a definitive answer to that question… but so far it’s been a week since I did the redirects, and I’m still not seeing any of the PR5 appearing on the new page!

Because the rest of these pages have PR’s of 4 and 5, I’m waiting to see how long this takes with just one important page before I do the BIG update where I do a 301 redirect for the rest of them…

( I’ll let you know here how many days it takes for the PR to appear on the new page!)

Final Notes… Once you’ve moved pages, you really should try to contact everyone who has linked to the OLD page and ask them to update their links.

Oh… and if you DO actually need to remove a page completely, either:
1. do a 301 redirect to another (relevant) page, OR
2. make sure your 404 (page not found) error page is useful at helping people find something else on your site!

Resources: 301 redirects can be tricky – use this 301 redirect guide for help to do a 301 redirect properly, and pass on page rank & search engine position status from one page to another.

Comments

One Response to “Site updates, 301 redirects, and link juice”

  1. admin on October 16th, 2011 12:26 am

    Final Comment on this – all previous comments deleted.

    Essentially, my “experiment” with the new design I wanted has failed as the chosen layout impacted severely on my ad clickthrough rates – big-time!

    Instead, I’ve revamped the “old” design to make it look a little more modern.

    That meant that I have also decided to abandon the proposed mass changes to plug everything into WordPress and redirect all the old URLs to new ones… instead opting to keep the original pages and URLs intact.

    All I can say with confidence is that SOME of the old page rank seems to be transferred (eventually) to a new page. (funny thing is, when I went back to my “old” page talked about above… the PR still seemed intact!)

    My closing thoughts on this are that if it ain’t broke… don’t try to fix it! :)

    Cheers
    Stephen

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