By
Bruce Newburger
Have you ever clicked a site
listing on the search results in Google or Yahoo only to find a "404
Error - Page Not Found" message? Of course you have! How would you know
if the destination site no longer exists, or if that particular web page
address (URL) is no longer supported? You don't know and probably don't care,
since you are likely to navigate back to the search results page and select
another site.
If the destination site still
exists, but that particular URL no longer does, then that site owner has just
missed an opportunity to entertain a targeted and interested website visitor.
This tip can help you turn that miss into a hit.
BACKGROUND
These days, Dynamics Online and other website designers are more likely to
redesign an existing site than we are to design a new site from scratch. As a
website's structure, content, or underlying technology changes, the new site's
URLs will likely not exactly match the previous site's.
For example, a website
redesign for Abanaki Oil Skimmers included a consolidation of content that resulted in the discontinuing of the following URL:
http://www.abanaki.com/model8specs.html
However, searches in Yahoo still listed
this page on the search results
page, and continued to list it until Yahoo re-indexed the site. That may
take weeks or months to happen. This URL might also be linked to from other
sites, and those outdated links might persist even longer.
SOLUTION
The site owner needs to answer the question, "What would you like
to appear in place of the discontinued URL?"
One approach is to identify
the individual discontinued URLs and pick a URL on the new site that most
closely matches the content of the old site. In the above example, that might
be the new Abanaki product page found here:
http://www.abanaki.com/model8.html
In that case, we would design
a page, with the same URL as the discontinued URL, which immediately redirects
the visitor's browser to the most appropriate new page URL.
Another approach, better for
larger websites with 10 or more discontinued URLs, is to implement a general
404 error solution for the entire site. Implementation details vary by the
type of server hosting the site, but the idea is to intercept the 404 error
generated by a request for any non-existent URL and redirect the visitor's
browser to either a more helpful error page or the site's home page. You can
see an example of a helpful error page here:
http://www.abanaki.com/oldpage.html
Contact Dynamics Online
to see if we can help identify discontinued URLs and turn them into new
opportunities for target site traffic.
