Spot when my new site went live. How would you fix this?
Posted Nov 2, 2016, 10:15 AM UTC
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I'm currently working on a new website as well, you need 301 redirects.
See here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
Basically, google has all your pages indexed and ranked and you just made a new website with all new pages. Google still has the old pages ranked and you are losing out on all those search results and users accessing your website. This is BAD.
You should re-direct all your important previous urls to the new ones. So if your previous portfolio page was grnat.com/weddings and it is now grnat.com/portfolio, you need a 301 redirect to keep all your Google juice and Google rankings for that page.
1
Thanks, I'll look into that!
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I was just listening to a podcast on SEO and got into Search Console for the first time. It greeted me with this bad news. Should I just leave it or is there a way to clean this up without bringing my old blogs back from the dead which aint gonna happen?
I just installed the "all-404-redirect-to-homepage" plugin and it seems to be working well. Not as good as having the content but it might get more people actually seeing my site rather than getting a 404.
The best thing to do is look at your logs for the requested pages. A lot of my 404s are just bots looking for robots.txt and trying to automatically hack my WordPress. I'm not bothered about those. If you have genuine requests then you should look at 303 redirects to make sure they see what they're looking for.