All websites over time will have broken links in the Google Index. Mapping these to a new version of the page address is important to keep Google and the search engines happy. When you move a website from one platform to another or you just need to broken links in google you create what's known as a Mapping file. Then using this file to create 301 redirects in the htaccess file. You can find your htaccess file under: Advanced Settings :: HTaccess Settings Beware though updating your htaccess file without validating it can cause your website to fail entirely. There is a link under the page to validate the file before saving it to your website.
301 Redirects
Creating a redirect from an old address to a new one is quite easy: RewriteRule ^customisation/premium-sites.shtml$ https://www.flowerstoreinabox.com.au/pricing/premium.shtml [R=301,L] The bold is the old address without the URL Then RewriteRule ^customisation/premium-sites.shtml$ https://www.flowerstoreinabox.com.au/pricing/premium.shtml [R=301,L] The bold is the new address. [R=301,L] ' simply tells that the page has mover PERMANENTLY to google for SEO purposes. A blank redirect would look like this: RewriteRule ^ $ [R=301,L] You need to create a line for each of the old or broken addresses.
What to do when re-launching a website
If you are relaunching an already published website you should create a list of every old link and map' these to the new links. In Google you can get a list of pages in a number of ways: You can type into the search box: site:yourdomainname where your domain name is your full domain name like http://www.flowerstoreinabox.com.au You can also use one of many tools to spider' your old site, or if you have Google Console access http://www.google.com/webmasters/ you can either get a list of crawl errors or indexed pages. It doesn't matter which method you choose it's all the same, you just need to make sure that all the pages that google has previously indexed that no longer exist on your site or the address has changed point to the new links.
What to do if the page no longer exists?
If the page you need to map has not exact match use the following choices:
- Match to a similar product or service
- Match to the product category of the old page
- Match to the homepage as a last resort.
Generally it's a good idea to create the mapping file first, validate it here: http://www.htaccesscheck.com/ and then add it to the htaccess file. If you don't want to do the work, one of our friendly team can do it for you and charge you for the time.
