Help Google point searchers to your pages

Having your website pages indexed by search engines such as Google is a vital part of your SEO.

So when you upgrade your site, or make any changes that result in new URLs for your pages, don’t neglect the index.

This means ensuring that every page gets indexed, not just your home page, and that redirects are planned and implemented.

Having every page indexed gives searchers more opportunities to find you because more specific content is crawled by the spiders.

For example, Undara Experience has a page on the Savannah Guides in their site. When you key ‘Savannah Guides’ into the Google search bar, a link to this page appears on page 1 of the search results.

Our recent upgrade of the Undara Experience website has made a big difference to the amount of content Google has indexed.

Their old site had some excellent content - but the Javascript menus made for a great spider trap, so only 23 of their pages were indexed.

Less than a week after going live, almost twice the number of pages were indexed, and now they have 66 pages in the Google index.

We also set up redirects from all their old pages to the relevant content on their upgraded site - a vital part of any website revamp or upgrade.

Just like setting up postal address redirects if you move office, you need redirects set up for every one of your indexed pages. Otherwise when the index brings up one of your old pages during a search, clicking on the link will give the searcher a ‘Page Not Found’ result, and the link might be removed.

The same goes for sites linking through to your site. As soon as they realise the page is no longer there, they may simply remove the link, and lost inbound links are going to be detrimental to your business.

There are a few ways redirects can be established. The best way is to use an Apache 301 redirect that tells search engines the page has been permanently moved.

When a site upgrade is involved that will change the URL of any indexed page:

1. Get a list of every page indexed by the search engines (you can do this by entering site:youraddress.com in the search box of Google and Yahoo).
2. For each page indexed, record the old URL and the new URL.
3. When you upgrade your site, make sure a redirect from the old page to the new page is set up.
4. When your site changes over, test each of the old page URLs to test the redirects are working.

Implementing 301 redirects is quite technical, so make sure your web developer knows what to do.

Tags: search engine index, SEO
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