Why should you care?

Once your website is ‘out there’, you don’t have any control over who links to it, so you must ensure that your customers are able to bookmark your pages. You only have a few seconds to make an impression and if someone gets a ‘page not found’ as a response to clicking on a URL link to your website, they probably won’t stay on a site where the navigation has broken down.

How is this related to Link Rot?

Believing that your navigation is so good that people will find your page anyway is folly. Link rot is developed when a page is taken down from a web site and a replacement page is not put up to explain where the page went to. A potential customer is then faced with an error message. There are many reasons why a site changes their addresses, most of them are bad for SEO, such as:

1. The site was organised in order to make it better
2. A developer could not keep track of existing documents
3. Re-branding
4. The hosting service went down.

While these reasons sound acceptable, but they are a lack of planning in the creation of URL’s?

Are these excuses?

Organising the site better may be a good idea, but breaking links while they still exist is really bad organisation and it ignores the references coming into the site from external links.

Not being able to keep track of existing documents is not excuse. Every web site has hundreds of related documents which need taking care of. A system of tracking has to be taken into account; if not all old links will be broken.

Re-Branding: while this sounds like a good time to get rid of old URL’s, it is only a good idea if you are changing the domain too. Your re-branding will be lost and your site will become ineffective because customers won’t be able to find the pages they are used to finding. It is easy to set up redirects that will take your customers to your new brand.

The Hosting service went down. This should only affect those who manage pages on a separate domain which are usual for company websites. In the process of transferring your domain to a new host, your pages will only go down temporarily if you own your own domain, but they should bounce back once the transfer is complete.

Don’t Complain

If you change your page locations without compensating, don’t blame the developer linking to you. You are the prime suspect, so don’t complain; rather put some steps in place to prevent it happening.

When reorganising your site, consider your URL’s permanent. Use the tools which are available with your server to relocate them when you move pages. If you don’t have access to redirects use Meta refresh tags instead.

Use your intelligence

Date your articles, but don’t date static pages. Rather use a generic form of the URL to define your documents.

Leave out information such as authors name and topic. Pages evolve and leaving them out means you won’t have to keep updating the URL. What software will you be using in the future? Good websites hide the back end server information while making the server stuff transparent and readable for the customer’s benefit so that if you were to change your software your customer will still be able to use the same URL’s.

Keep your web pages around and if you have to move them, use redirects.

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