Don't remove pages, redirect them

Sigh, you'd think I'd know better. Shortly after making my Invisible Fence Guide public as an AdSense case study, I decided to move the files for the first stage of the case study into a new folder on the website. On most systems, this is trivial to do: log into your web host and rename the folder and voila, the content's in a new folder. Then all you do is fixup a few of the internal links in the content and you're back in business.

Of course, it's never that simple. Once you've made a page public, removing it is a big no-no. Why? Because other sites, including search engines, that link to that page will all of a sudden return a big “oh-oh, the page is missing” error when visitors try to follow the link. That's not good, not good at all. To paraphrase DeBeers, “a web page is forever”. Once a page is up, keep it there. You see, I had forgotten about the link from the actual case study page to the first stage's home page. So here I was sending people to the case study page and they'd click on the link and get a big error message. Good move, Eric!

The solution is to never remove a page but instead to redirect the visitor to the appropriate (new) page. A redirection is basically the web server telling the web browser: “Yo! The page you want isn't at that address anymore, go to this page instead.” Most of the time this happens so quickly that the user doesn't even realize it.

How you redirect the page depends on how much access you have to the web server hosting your site/blog. If you have access, you can actually get the web server to send a redirect code directly to the browser. If you don't, you have to resort to trimming the original page and using a META tag or even a bit of JavaScript in the now-much-shorter page to do the redirection. The first method (web server does the redirection) is much better, as search engines and so on will follow the redirection automatically. If you can't do it that way, then be sure to include a link to the new page from the newly-trimmed original page so that search engines can at least find the new page that way.

For more help on this topic, just do a Google search for “redirecting a web page” and you'll find lots of information.

The caveat in all of this is to test and retest the links on your own sites to make sure that you're getting the results you expected. Even seasoned pros can make mistakes, but it sure looks bad when they do!

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book.

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