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If your site is going through a massive makeover, the end result involves brand new URLs and you have an active SEO campaign, it’s important to include a link development specialist in the process. Why? Because it’s quite possible you have links pointing to the old URLs. You don’t want to lose the value of those links that has been built up to this point.
Make sure that you let your SEO team know that you are about to embark on a 301 redirect execution well before it actually happens. Give them a date and then stick with it (in other words, don’t move forward earlier than that date). A couple of days before it’s scheduled to happen, your link development specialist (should) will get very busy.
First, they will look at all the links pointing to your site. They’ll take a benchmark and track it through the entire process of putting those 301s in place. Next, they’ll go a bit deeper and pull the links that are pointing to your high level landing pages. They’ll start with category level, move into the subcategory level, and so on. If you have a large e-commerce site, they won’t pull links to all of your 30,000 products; but they can look at your most popular products, your best sellers, or the ones that have gotten the most buzz online.
They will have all the old links available so that when the 301 redirects are put into place, they can reach out to the Webmasters of the linking sites and ask them to change the destination of the link to the new page.
The third thing your link development specialist should do (in conjunction with your SEO specialist) is track the old URLs to the new URLs and make sure each 301 redirect is working correctly. The reason the link development personnel need to be involved is because they have the list of the old URLs at their disposal – they’re tracking the old links and where they were pointing. They can alert you if there are any issues.
Finally, the link expert should be providing information on the old links and what’s happening with them. Providing that information to everyone involved in the project will be extremely beneficial as you plan any future content creation or migration strategies.
But why should you care? Don’t 301 redirects transfer all the link juice to the new URL? Sure, there’s a lot of evidence that does in fact happen. Here’s why you do all this work:
- So that you know what types of links you have.
- If the content of the page changes drastically, you can execute link reclamation more effectively.
- You can track to see if those 301s are truly passing the value of the old links.
- You have a better feel for what people care about on your site.
- A direct link is better than a redirected link.
Take the extra steps to involve your SEO team (including your link development expert) in the 301 redirect process and your SEO efforts will not suffer.
