Don’t Be Your Librarian’s Worst Nightmare

30 Mar 2019 1 Comment

by Becky in Tutorial Series, Web, Web@Work

And by Librarian, I mean Gogglebot…

It’s crucial to routinely give an update to the Search Engines they are aware of all of the exciting changes on your website, whenever you are about to launch a brand new website with PCFWebsolutions or simply making changes to your content or renaming any URLs to your pages.

You might not think these small changes are anything significant, but if have ever seen an annoying “404” (error) page you might want to read more. It’s possible customers are seeing YOUR 404 page. Embarrassing…

You might ask, “What’s the harm in changing www.supercoolsite.com/index.php?page=pogosticks to https://supercoolsite.com/pogosticks?”

After all, you believe it’s obvious where the new location of your page is on your site, but not for Googlebot. This robot occasionally scans all of your pages as well as the content contained in each page to later reference this information as a solution to a question someone might be searching for.

Say for instance someone was searching online for a Pogostick.

Very much like approaching a local librarian to ask if there are any books about Pogosticks. Our internet’s librarian, known as ‘Googlebot’, immediately responds, “Oh yes! I know where you can read about pogo sticks!” They will then ask the user to follow them as they walk through the library (the internet) to locate their book (a page on your website). And much like a book, labeled and categorized to sit at a particular spot on a particular shelf, Googlebot will expect to find this “book” (webpage) exactly where it should belong. You think “Hey, that’s awesome!” You’ve written about pogo sticks and even sell them! They’re going to go straight to your website, right?

However, as soon as your audience arrived on this page, IT’S GONE! Your audience becomes confused, perhaps even frustrated, as they wish to exit and bounce out of your site and instead pick up a different “book” (your competitor’s website: https://lesscoolwebsite.com/pogosticks).

Googlebot is also confused and assumes it’s lost. After this occurrence repeats itself a few more times, Googlebot will have no choice, but to drop this page from its records and consequently DROP YOUR SEO YOU’VE BEEN BUILDING FOR YEARS!

“But my pages aren’t missing, there’s just on another “shelf” not too far…”

It doesn’t matter.

The customer already got what they needed but from someone else. NOT YOU!  What a sad story… but no fear! We can prevent this awful scenario altogether by letting Googlebot know where all of these “missing” pages are, by redirecting these old links to the new links! This practice is how you can maintain your SEO value.

Of course, there are multiple ways to redirect pages, but to be safe, a “301” redirect is preferable over other redirects such as “302” and “307”.

This sounds a lot like gibberish, but let me explain: “301” indicates merely to web browsers and search engine bots (Googlebot isn’t the only one out there) that the page has moved PERMANENTLY. That means not only has the page changed location but that the content—or an updated version of it—can be found at the new URL! A “301” passes between 90-99% of link equity (ranking power) to the redirected page.

Here at Print & Copy Factory, we can communicate with Search Engine Bots and see what pages they might be looking for, but can’t seem to track down and help guide them to the new locations of these pages. New customers are buying your pogo sticks. No sad stories!

So if you’re making changes on your own or may feel that you might want us to look into Indexing and Redirection for you, don’t hesitate to contact us!

You don’t want your SEO to drop. On top of this, we also provide SEO services to boost our client’s website’s Search Ranking and convert prospects into customers!

Hi, my name is Jake and I’m the Web Administrator, Front-end Developer, and go-to web guru for all of the technical questions you may have. We host over 130 websites and provide all kinds of web services to our clients including newsletter email campaigns, engineering new websites, monthly backups, contact form building, etc… you name it – I’ve got a solution!

You can contact me by emailing to support@pcfwebsolutions.com