Hi I have just redesigned my site and in Google Webmaster tools there are 80 pages that show up as crawl errors because of the pages no longer exist as it is a different URL structure. Will this affect my SEO ranking such, and how do I go about using a 301 redirect to send the visitor to the new version of the page? TIA
Yes it could affect your rankings so you should fix all your 404 by redirecting the visitor to the new corresponding page. Do you have acces to the .htaccess file ? If the answer is yes, you can make all the redirects in this file like that : RedirectPermanent old-page-name.html http://www.you-website-url.tld/new-page-name.html It must be on the same line, without any return.
Either do 301 redirect those pages or exclude those from Google index using the robots.txt file. The urls you disallow in robots.txt will be fainted out from Google index after some time.
Thanks can an .htaccess file be created in notepad and then saved as .htaccess? Then where does it sit on the webserver on the web root? Is there a way of checking that it has been created and uploaded correctly? For example I have started an .htaccess file shown below to fix canonical issues, does this look ok? And how would I add the redirects would it be RedirectPermanent oldpage.php mydomain.co. uk/newpage-name.php Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain. co.uk RewriteRule ^(.*)$ www. mydomain. co.uk /$1 [L,R=301] RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
Yes your .htaccess seems to be ok. You have to upload it at your website root, yes. But you have to check if your host have enabled the apache mod_rewrite And yes for the redirect, the syntax is ok, just put it after your last rewrite rule
Also to fix the canonical url issue - how do you check that you first of all have canonical url issues? Is it if google views the following http:// domain. co.uk http:// www. domain. co.uk http:// www .domain.co.uk/ index.php http:// domain. co.uk /index.php as four seperate pages, which affects your search ranking? Also how then would you build 4 URL's into the rewritecond above as the example above only has one URL?
301 redirect in your htaccess is key, like this: 301 redirect old_page.html full_url_to_new_page.html
Thanks but how would you change the code below Options +FollowSymlinks RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain. co.uk RewriteRule ^(.*)$ www. mydomain. co.uk /$1 [L,R=301] RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L] so that the following URLs point/rewrite to http:// www. domain. co.uk ? http:// domain. co.uk and http:// domain. co.uk /index.php and http:// www .domain.co.uk/ index.php
It's a fact, Page Not Found, known as a 404 error, can harm your website Ranking with Search Engines as well as being a Turn-Off for Visitors.
Hi ianv, here is the right code for redirecting the duplicate cases : #redirects all url's to the with www ones RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.co.uk$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.mydomain.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301] #redirects all index types to the domain root RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^(GET|POST|HEAD)\ (/.*)?/index.(htm|html|php|asp|shtml) RewriteRule ^(.*)index.(htm|html|php|asp|shtml)$ /$1 [R=301,L] #redirects the trailing slash RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule ^(.+)/$ /$1 [R=301,L] Hope it helps!