301s - A Year Late

[jkosarek]

A website I recently was asked to help with was redesigned last year, but no 301s were setup. Looking at the old URLs 95% of the ones from early 2013 are 404s. Their traffic dropped from 50,000 per month to 10,000 and I believe this is one of the reasons.

Now the question is: a year later, will it do any good to setup 301 redirects from those old urls. My current thought is that the old URLs have probably lost any link juice they had. But it should hurt anything to setup the 301s anyway.

Any thoughts on whether this is worth my time and effort?

[Highland]

Yes. It's better late than never. You might not get any rank but I consider 301s to be good policy beyond the SEO aspect. I hate going to a page where there's a link and I click it and I get a 404 or bounced to the front page. Perhaps I have a bookmark. Perhaps it's an old link. Whatever the case, do your visitors a courtesy and redirect them to the correct page.

[GPainter]

Hiya, they may have lost link juice but then again there may be a blog giving you praise with a link that still "active".  It's never too late to make a 301, remember though its best to 301 to the most relevant category or closest page. You can also set up a soft 404 page so even if you miss one the user can still navigate to a page like home page.

Moz has some great tips if you want a read or to refresh your mind.

http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

[ThompsonPaul]

Absolutely get those 301s into place as soon as possible Beth! Not only will you likely see some increased traffic from links that are out there to the old pages, but you'll also likely see a nice rankings boost. Right now, any links to the old pages are essentially "lost" to your site for ranking influence purposes. Getting the redirects in place will allow that ranking influence to again be credited to the client's new pages.

When you do start adding the redirects, make sure to add an Annotation to the related Google Analytics profile. Depending on the number and quality of the redirected pages, and on whether the site's 404 page currently has Analytics tracking, you're going to see a bit of a shift in engagement metrics. If there's no tracking on the 404 page, you'll see an increase in visits as visitors land on "real" pages instead of the 404. If there was 404 tracking before, you'll see a decrease in Bounce Rate and increase in pages/visit as far more visitors stick around the real pages instead of just bouncing from the 404 page. You'll want to be able to refer back to the date the redirecting started so you'll always be able to put stats changes into context around this process. (e.g. a year form now when the client is trying to figure out why there was a site improvement around this time)

[Hint - make sure you've got solid 404 page tracking in Analytics and keep checking it as you go along. It's an essential addition to just watching for what's showing up in Webmaster Tools, for example.]

Some more suggestions for the process:

• Use Analytics to track improvements in the metrics you expect to benefit from this process. This is how you'll demonstrate the benefit of the work, and get credit (and therefore reputation) for your efforts. You can even set up Goals around the expected improvements to make them easier to track.
• Use Screaming Frog, Xenu Link Sleuth or equivalent tool to run a check of all internal pages to ensure none of your own pages include broken internal links. Screaming Frog (paid version) can also be used to bulk-test your redirects immediately after implementation.
• Watch for any high-value incoming links to old pages that you think you might be able to get corrected at source (i.e. an external site you have any sort of relationship with). Since each redirect wastes a bit of "link juice" you're even better off getting the original link corrected to point to the right page, instead of having to go through the redirect. Only worth it for strong links.
• Watch for opportunities to use REGEX to combine several redirects into one rule. Fewer rules is better for site speed.
• If you don't have a copy of the original site to extract the URLs from, you can use the Wayback Machine to see a version of the site form before the migration.
• to create a list of the old URLs that are still indexed, use the site:mydomain.com search operator to find the majority of still-indexed URLs. You can then use the SERPSRedux bookmarklet to scrape all the results into a csv and use Excel filtering to find all the old URLs (tip - set your Google Search results to show 100 results per page to make the scraping faster)
• Set up an ongoing and regular process for checking for and dealing with such 404s. Any site should have this in place, but especially one that has been redeveloped.

Lastly, since you know you've got a lot of 404's coming in, make certain you have a really top-notch 404 error page that is designed to capture as many visitors and possible and help move them to real content without losing them. Again, important for any site, but well worth extra attention for any site that knows it has a 404 problem. (This is far better than "soft 404ing" to a home page, for example, for a number of technical and usability reasons.)

So bottom line on "whether this is worth my time and effort?" You better believe it is. probably one of the best things you could do for the site at this point. I have direct experience doing this for several sites and the improvements are significant and quite gratifying - both for you and the site owner.

Hope those are useful ideas?

Paul