SEO Redirection
Image: Simon Howden / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
How many times has a search spider visited your blog to find something missing or in the wrong place? This can happen if you somehow lose content, delete content on purpose, or move your blog. The search engine spiders will continue to look for old pages, and when they find them missing, they don’t much like it.
What to do?
Add a simple plugin to your blog called “Redirection,” which will help you to create permanent 301 redirects to the right pages or redirect the spider to another page entirely or at random.
But how do you know which pages are causing issues?
Look in your Google Webmaster Tools account, under “Diagnostic,” and then, “crawl errors.” Get the list of pages that spiders aren’t finding and add them to the
redirect page. You’ll find this in Tools/Redirection after you install the plugin. Then, take the bad pages, and redirect them to either the “right” post
or to a random page and the spiders will happily go on their merry way.
If you don’t work on this, it will look like you’re a crummy webmaster and you may never get that precious page rank. Who cares? Well… you shouldn’t care
too much about page rank, but you do want your pages to show up in the SERPs, so having missing pages is definitely a factor.
Take care of the spiders and they’ll take care of you.
