Right now I’m faced with a fiasco of link changes occurring that are being defined by our UE group, vs. Merchandisers or SEO.  A say that with a big side note: the people doing it are doing a fantastic job, had a very good talk with them today, and they are certainly doing the changes with good reason.  But as I explained to them and many other people, if you change the URL and don’t tell anyone about it, you lose all your “friends”

The best analogy would be moving from one house to another.  If you don’t tell your friends how to get to the new address they will never be able to find you.  That exactly how our friends are on the Internet.  If a link points to your page, either from another site or the search engine, you simply lose it, it’s gone bye bye.  So even if you have little link juice arriving at that page you might still have some history and it will be lost.  Remember a little history added up over time increases the amount there, so you don’t want to lose any of it.

What can you do? As the title states, use 301 Redirects.  A 301 lets everyone know that you have a new address.  All my friends know to pass all my birthday cards to the new address, Google knows where to visit me from and at the end of the day we are all happy.

How do you help taxonomists?

1. You work on a tool that will help when they need to make changes.
2. You tell them to stop (not always the best idea, or the most realistic)
3. Make all changes go through and SEO Screen knowing that it will only have slight impact
4. Do what we did at another company we made taxonomy a function of SEO

I think #1 is the easiest short term solution, a tool that allows taxonomist to invoke 301′s when they make changes. Educating them on the potential impact is step 1, step 2 is helping them with tool implementation in order to ensure solid forwarding, step 3 is to limit possible damage, step 4 is to make changes in taxonomy to the SEO better.

We are just starting to really dig into this issue, we’ll see where it goes from here.  ”Do No Harm” is a great mantra, but sometimes you have to make a new cut to get rid of a scar.

So what is involved with doing the 301′s and why would anyone want to do them?  Basic SEO 101, if you have a page in Google, don’t let Google lose site of it (unless you want it gone).  So you tell the server that a specific page has been 301′d to the new url.  301′s tell Google this is a permanent move, 302′s say it’s just temporary.  So if you have htaccess on your maching you can simply drop a line like this in it:

redirect 301 /cat_9.html http://www.danielcoburn.com/category/games/

This tells the server take the url sent to the server by a user “/cat_9.html” and send it to “/category/games/”

Easy to do, just a pain to do so many.

New theme should be around soon…

I’ll post more often.