Hello all, I am quite new to SEO so I have following question: My website will have some major changes soon, means some main pages will not exist anymore. Means many sites will be broken, but they are linked from various forums and homepages. Here is the problem: There might be a lot of broken links in the future, is there any good solution for that? Can I redirect them to other links or shall I ask those forums and homepages to remove those links? Kind regards, Peter Miller
Use 301 redirections. Nevertheless, it´s recommendable to contact with your "backlink owners" and ask them to change the URLs. They should be interested in the new URLs too.
No one enjoys clicking on a link that seems to be exactly what they are looking for only to find that no web page is there. From a business standpoint, if your links are broken your customers do not find what they are looking for they might not want to return to your site. If a link on your webpage says "click here to purchase" then that link should lead to your shopping cart or procedure. If that link is broken, no one can buy that item. How to check for broken links throughout your site - If your site is small you can ensure manually that your links are functioning by clicking each one and making sure the link is functional. When making a webpage, one should manually check each link. On larger sites the above method is impractical if not impossible and you will have to rely on software that checks your links for you. (see resources below) The two most common reasons your links might be broken are: - Not "checking" links thoroughly when creating and publishing a page. - A page you are linking to on another site might change or disappear entirely because of a site redesign or removal of an article. When linking to resources on other sites it is important to check these links more often than you would check links to resources on your own web page. Proper website maintenance should include a check for broken links daily, weekly, or monthly depending on the size and complexity of your site. Broken links are a sign of a poorly maintained website. Correct HTML- Ensuring the HTML is correct on your web pages is essential. A web page may look normal to a user and display correctly in a web browser even when the HTML is not correct. Checking for HTML is quite simple but correcting the mistakes you find can be more difficult. Why does HTML need to be correct? If your HTML is correct then the search engines crawlers will be able to visit your site and index your pages. Incorrect HTML can block the crawlers fully or partially which potentially can lead to the improper indexing of your pages or result in your pages not being indexed at all. Correct HTML loads faster than incorrect HTML. Incorrectly written HTML can result in your web pages to load significantly slower, and the longer it takes your web page to load, the more visitors you will lose or frustrate. Correct HTML also ensures that your web page will be displayed correctly in different types of browsers both now and in the future. HTML is controlled by standards and the more these standards are adhered to the more likely your site will be viewed correctly (incorrect HTML displays differently in Internet Explorer than it does in Fire fox as an example).
wow, you really did put a lot of effort in this post! as a DP member, I thank you for that I can't explain it better myself.
Peter, forum links cannot be changed, you can always add a new link for future posts, but the backlinks from other sites can be changed by requesting the webmaster. And as blitehead said you should do 301 redirect from the old page to the new page in order to pass all the link juice. Artemporio, please do read the question and answer for the same. From the question Peter posted it is evident that he knows what is broken links and he is going to change urls of few pages which has backlinks, in order to pass all the link juice to the new page he needs guidance that's the question. If a person asks how to make money online don't explain him what is money.
If the forum links etc point to a page on your site that will be not needed on your new site, use a 301 redirect from the old page to the most suitable new page. That way when people click the link from the forum they will still be taken to a relevant page on your site and the search engines should still pass on any link juice from the old link to the new page.
Broken links and 404 Errors are a problem that have plagued almost all websites since the dawn of the internet. There’s nothing attractive about clicking a link hoping that it’ll take you to your destination only to find out that the page doesn’t exist.
No he didn't. He copied the article from here without giving credit! http://www.feedthebot.com/linksandhtml.html
for the broken link I suggest use page redirections, 301 will do.. but some also uses canonical tagging for google.