Easy SEO Boost: Clean up After Yourself
You have set your site up to use SEO friendly URL’s, made sure all the links are valid, and that every page in the site is linked to from other pages. This is all good and well, but what happens when you start moving pages around, or deleting them? It’s very easy to forgot about those old pages: they’re not linked to anymore, so problem solved, right? Well, no... Search Engines have an elephant like memory, they will not “forget” a page unless they are specifically told to do so. They will keep crawling your site for those pages, and either get a 404 error, or see a generic message saying the page doesn’t exist. This can hurt your SEO rank, because search engines tend to frown on too many 404 error, or different URLs that return the same content. It is important to make sure that whatever platform you use for your site, it can handle those changes properly. If a page moves, the old URL should return a 301 redirect to the new URL. This will preserve the page rank and avoid having duplicate data. If you delete a page, you should tell search engines about it, and do a 301 redirect to a new URL (preferably the homepage). This will tell search engines that the old page does not exist anymore, and that they should stop crawling it. If you’re using Prestashop, see our Duplicate URL Redirect module, which implements all the tips above.