Cure For Common Marketing

Re-branding a Website? Don’t Forget Your Re-directs

Posted on | June 3, 2008 | drew stauffer

Creating a new website is always an exciting time for any company. A lot can go into a new website and one aspect that people often over look is the redirection of their old web pages.

Every web page on your site has a unique URL and it’s very easy to change the structure of your website when you go through the process of a re-design. If you don’t take proper redirection into account you can end up with many 404 (page not found) error pages. Error pages are very unprofessional and can often confuse the user so much that they will leave your website.

For example, xyz.com decides to re-design their website:

Their old about page is:xyz.com/about

On the new site they want the about page to say company: xyz.com/company

If you don’t setup a 301 redirect, when a user goes to xyz.com/about they will get a 404 error page.

Why is this even important?

You might think that this is insignificant in the grand scheme of your web presence, but it is actually a huge mistake that a lot of companies make.

Any time a user has chosen to bookmark a page on your site, if you don’t redirect them to the new page they get a 404 error and leave your site.

Inbound links are one of THE MOST IMPORTANT aspects of your web campaign and if you don’t set up 301 redirects then you will lose all of your old links when you launch your new site.

Alternatively, you could take the time to find all of your inbound links, contact every single website and ask them to update the links to your site, but depending on how long your site has been online and how many links you already have, that could take months.

Quick Solution

If by chance you have a huge database site with thousands of pages and can’t take the time to do proper 301 redirects then you can at least create a custom 404 page.

A custom 404 page will often be a copy of one of your interior pages that will include your navigation. You can also include a little bit of information about why they’ve come across a page that no longer exists.

A 404 page supplied by the server looks like this:

Server 404 page

As you can see this page doesn’t give much help to the user about where they are or where there trying to go.

This is a custom 404 error page from this site:

Cure for Common Marketing 404 page

From this page you can see that the URL the user tried is no longer available on this site and since you know that you’re in the wrong place you can use the navigation to try and get to where you’re going. This page at least matches our site and doesn’t confuse the user to much. Here is what the full error page looks like.

The Best Solution

301 redirects are the best way to handle movement of pages both for your users and your search engine optimization. Unlike a custom 404 error page, a 301 redirect will pass link juice to your new page.

The method of your 301 redirect is going to depend on your server. Most servers are either going to be an Apache or Microsoft server. If you use an Apache server, 301 redirects are a piece of cake. Just create a .htaccess file if you don’t already have one and write a few lines of code. If you use a Microsoft server, 301’s are possible but a lot more time consuming.

Here are a few links to help you out with both Apache 301 redirects and Microsoft 301 redirects.

Filed Under Website Development | 2 Comments

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Comments

2 Responses to “Re-branding a Website? Don’t Forget Your Re-directs”

  1. Akash
    April 23rd, 2010 @ 7:43 am

    But I have a slightly different issue here.. I have a running site (with Adsense account applied for). And now I want to copy the entire site in a new domain (with a different name). But I don’t want to lose my visitors and page ranks. So is 301 redirect a solution for me?

  2. drew stauffer
    May 14th, 2010 @ 9:25 am

    Yup. 9 times out of 10, a 301 is always your best bet if you need to retain rankings and inbound links when you HAVE to move a URL.

    Good luck

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