-
Moving to a new content delivery system that alters all your URLS
- Purchase
of an already existing web site that has link equity
- Changing
domains
- Major
site reorganization
For large
sites with hundreds of inbound links this can be overwhelming. When every
URL on your site changes that means every link from every other site to
your site becomes useless, unless you take steps to prevent that from happening.
I call these links Orphaned Links. The steps to take will vary depending
on your particular situation. The best case scenario is a domain
name change where all directories and file names stay the same. Then, the
301
redirect approach makes sense, and there's no need to contact any of
the sites linking to you.
The worse
case scenario is when you change domains, change directory structure and
files names (like when you migrate to a dynamic content delivery), but
you don't have any log data from the prior site to analyze, and you serve
a generic error 404 page.
Example
A page
that started as...
Discovery
Health Allergy and Asthma Center
http://health.discovery.com/centers/allergyasthma/allergyasthma.html
became...
Discovery
Health Allergies
http://health.discovery.com/centers/allergyasthma/allergy/allergy.html
This caused
100+ orphaned links to the original page. Now it's under 10, so they either
lost 90 links or they were recovered. My guess? Lost.
Yahoo
Search
Example
wasted inbounds
Time
Warner Cable in the Classroom
Respironics
If this
happens to you, remember...
The various
sites around the web that were linking to your old pages likely still are
linking to them
You can use
search engines, software like LinkSurvey, and your own logs to identify
where those old links are
Contact those
sites to request changes be made
