Use SEO to Maintain Reputation, Don't Throw Away History and PageRank

I have to tell you a sad story, not to be mean, but as a cautionary example.

Today, I interviewed a potential client whose domain has been live online since 1998. Despite this long history and a well designed site, his Google PageRank is zero! And, although his site contains 421 pages, Google indexes only 163. I counted 136 incoming links but Google credits none.

Obviously, there is something wrong. I looked for reasons he might be blacklisted or punished by Google...nothing. It really is a fine website.

Then, I asked if the site had been redesigned recently. And there was the problem. Within the last 60 days his site had been completely redesigned, with new dynamic pages, a new look, and new content.

His designers had failed to establish page redirects from the old page file names to new file names. From the search engine point of view this was an entirely new, virtually unrelated, website. He lost all pagerank, history, and authority with Google.

This loss was avoidable. All that had to be done was to direct search engines from the old file names to the closest equivalent replacement pages. 301 redirects are the usual method with which to do this.

If you are running a Unix/Linux/Apache server the whole thing is remarkably easy. A simple text file, titled ".htaccess" placed in the root directory of the website is all you need. Just one line of text for each page forwarded takes care of everything.

A Windows server requires a bit more work, but there are several ways to accomplish the task.

Don't throw away years of work and reputation. Be sure to redirect page file names to new pages.

Enjoy your continued SEO success!