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Hello,

I’m making some SEO improvements to my content and need to make some changes to the Title and url_Title entry fields. When I do this do I need to do a 301 redirect for each entry changed in order to prevent dead links?

Thank

Any links generated via expressionengine will update automatically, but if anyone tries to visit the old URL they’ll get a 404 unless you redirect them.

Thanks for the assist, Philip.

Ramone, does that make sense? It depends on how frequently someone might stumble onto the wrong page. You could also just make an error page that has new links to the changed titles.

Does that help?

You could also just make an error page that has new links to the changed titles.

Sue ... could you give an example of what an ‘error page’ would look like?

Thanks.

There are multiple ways to do this, it could be a sitemap / search page used as a page, etc. Lots of possibilities. Let me move this to the CodeShare Corner so we don’t have to close it.

Any changes here could affect rankings and traffic.  Consider a scenario where you have a page which has good rankings in part because it has lots of backlinks.  If you change the URL with no 301 redirect on the old URL then you lose the linkjuice and the rankings for that page. The search engines then have to re-index that page and it has to go through all the rankings hoops again.  It’s possible that some rankings may never recover based on variables which we can only guess on and you would have to do a lot of work to get those back.

Personally, I would treat this as a “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it” scenario.  If you are only making changes to titles and url titles then you could leave old entries alone and only update the major top level pages.  That would save you some work in redirects while still keeping the most immediately visible parts of the site consistent with your new scheme.

Every page that has link juice to it and backlinks can influence your rankings. For 404 pages I can recommend this article: http://joviawebstudio.com/blog/guide_to_404_pages_with_expressionengine/

The best way is to 301 redirect the old page URI to the new page URI. When a page is deleted you could redirect to the category page. Don’t forget that when you have a lot of traffic you might test the amount of extra requests that the 301’s might cause. Double check if the 301 is handled correctly with an HTTP Requests plugin or something like that. When you do this correctly your page might be a few days out of Google’s results but it should be return to normal in a few days.