Help with site structure needed - any assistance welcomed!

[janc]

Hi all,

I am currently tasked with finding a better way to optimise our website ukdocumentstorage dot com.

For starters, I would like to know what our site structure actually is at present. So I would like to be able to see which pages are linking to what at the moment & which pages have broken links on which I need to remove from the content. Hopefully I'd then be able to tidy up any errors that the site already has in its internal linking.

Is there a way to do this easily? Or to have a graphical representation of the sites structure?

I have just signed into our Webmaster Tools account and I am faced with a list of 10 'Crawl Errors' which are all 404 errors. Some of them do not actually exist anymore, but are still being linked to from a few pages according to WMT.

For example,  /industries_served_legal.htm is still being linked to from 5 of our pages (including /industries_served_local_authority.htm)

However, this doesn't seem to be a case at all on the page as I can't find a link to /industries_served_legal.htm on /industries_served_local_authority.htm. Any advice as to why this is happening? Is there a way to find out easily where these broken links are situated on the page? And if I do actually manage to find our broken links, how would I go about removing them?

The page /document_security.htm doesn't exist in our Sitewizard list of pages anymore, yet still exists online. How do I go about deleting this unecessary page properly? And does this harm our rankings?

The document_security page also has an extra link on the top toolbar to a Document Management page, an addition which is no longer present on our up to date pages. Now this page (and the extra dropdown page when you hover over it) still exist on our list of Sitewizard pages at the moment, but we obviously no longer want to have  these online anymore. How should I remove these?

I understand that this is a lot of information, and so I would appreciate any help that can be given on these!

Many thanks

[Mike.Goracke]

Whoa! Information overload!!!

1. I don't know of anything that shows you a graphical representation of your site's linking structure; however, I do know of a program that will list out all of the linking pages on your site and the number of in and out links, including anchor text, etc. The number of in links can be an indicator of structurally how your site is organized.

2. 404 errors or not bad as long as they are known. If you no longer have a page and you decide not to redirect from the old page to a new one, that is fine. Google is just giving you a heads up that your site or someone else's is linking to a non existent page. If you do nothing to fix these 404 errors, the page will eventually be removed from Google's index and not be a problem.

3. /document_security.htm looks like it is being linked to from /services_storage_fast_retrieval.htm and  /services_archive_storage.htm

I would recommend downloading and installing Screaming Frog that is the program I was referencing in my response to #1 and that is how I found the issue in #3.

Seer Interactive also wrote a great blog on all of the things this tool can do.

Hope this helps.

Mike

[JustinTaylor88]

To add to Mike's answer

2: If the page is deleted and isn't coming back you may want to 301 it to its new equivalent of possible even return a 410 a status code to tell search engines the pages has been permanently removed

For more info on Status codes see the following article
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/http-status-codes

[janc]

Apologies for the overload!

So my take-way from this is that any pages that I have deleted but are still able to be found the internet (e.g. /document_security) I don't need to worry about actively trying to remove from the internet as it will be removed by Google automatically in the future? And having these pages still existing on the internet (despite not having any current links going to them from pages I haven't deleted) will not harm my site?

Thank you for all of your help so far!

[Mike.Goracke]

Here is an example that may help:

You have the following pages on your site - /product1.html, /product2.html, and /product3.html.

An external site (externalsite.com) links to the product 2 page on your site (yoursite.com/product2.html).

You decide to no longer sell product 2, so your remove /product2.html from your website; however, externalsite.com is still linking to yoursite.com/product2.html. You see a 404 warning in Google Webmaster Tools referencing this error.

You then have two options:

1. You recently started selling product 4, which is not the same product, but still offers the same solution to a potential customer. You create a /product4.html page and set up a 301 redirect from externalsite.com to yoursite.com/product4.html.

2. You no longer sell this product or solutions like it, because it was not needed by visitors. There is a link from externalsite.com is no longer applicable to your site; therefore, you disregard the warning in Google Webmaster Tools and the link will eventually not be followed by Google.

Now, if the /product2.html page was still accessible online, but you no longer linked to it via yoursite.com, that is kind of a problem, because if externalsite.com is still linking there, visitors could stumble upon your old/outdated/not-used page. You do not need to actively worry about removing the link, but you should work on removing the page if it is no longer used.

Does that help and did I understand your question correctly?

Mike

[janc]

So even though the text is different, I should re-direct people clicking on the link to the old document-security to the newer secure-document-storage page?

[Mike.Goracke]

If this is an internal link on your website, you would want to change the actual path to point to the newer secure-document-storage page.

If this is an external link from another website, you'd create a redirect that will take the incoming request for the old document-security page and push the visitor to the new secure-document-storage page.

Make sense?

Mike

[janc]

Perfect sense thank you! I'll now research how to actually do this re-direct.