SMarT Marketing

When your ready to launch a new site, it is easy to forget the little things, like search engine rankings. Enamored by the glitz of a fresh looking website and new images, often redirects are overlooked and the old site just forgotten.

But Google will not forget so easily, unless properly told. The old site worked hard to migrate up the rankings, slipping past competitors and nestling on the first page. Often the old site’s content was so amazing that outsiders would even link to it. If the new site goes live without telling the server what to do with people following these inbound links, people will just get kicked to the 404 Error landing page. Sure they find the site, but what happens with those back links in the eyes of mighty Google. Google follows the keyword-laden “Best Pastry Puffs Ever” link to your Pasty Puffs page and receives a 404 Error - the page no longer exists and therefore it no longer important. But, when using a 301 Redirect on the old page, Google sees the the old Pastry Puffs page, sees that it has permanently moved to the new Pastry Puffs page and siphons all that “Best Pastry Puffs Ever” importance and keyword relevancy to the new page.

But what happens if your hosting company uses a Microsoft IIS server, without the capability to implement all these integral 301 Redirects? Well then you politely ask them to improve their services, download the necessary software, so you don’t drop off Google, let alone MSN. (If you can imagine.) We want our httpd.ini access files. This file gives you the ability to implement these necessary 301 Redirects. (A 301 is a type of redirect, which the server uses to tell search bots that the page has permanently moved.) This type of file is standard on an Apache server, although it is a .htaccess file.

So when approaching a site launch, ask your hosting company if they provide said service. If not, it may be time to 301 your hosting.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 11:19 am and is filed under Internet Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.