Whether you are changing up your product line, removing some services, or looking to get rid of outdated content on your website, it’s important that you keep in mind the repercussions of not keeping SEO in mind.
From 404s to user experience issues, there are factors that you may forget about, even though they can be crucial. Here are four key things you should do when condensing your site that can help you keep your SEO rankings.
401 Redirects
If you are going to be deleting pages or blog posts on your website, it’s quite important that you make sure that you perform redirects as well!
For the pages you want to delete, you can redirect them to your homepage, other relevant product or service pages, or to a new page you create.
Doing this will ensure that you do not have 404 pages on your website, so users won’t find them when visiting your site and can get to exactly what they need.
Implementing 401 redirects will vary based on what platform your website is built on, so be sure to coordinate with your web developer before you delete any content.
Interlinking
Redirects of deleted pages aren’t the only aspect you need to worry about. You may forget that over the years of having a website, you were likely linking these soon-to-be redirected pages throughout your entire site!
So it would be a good idea to go through your website and see if there are any places the deleted pages are linked. You can then remove the link or replace the link to a different page.
Menus
Similar to interlinks, you will want to make sure any pages that no longer exist are taken off the navigation of your website, sidebars, and/or in the footer of your website.
Not only does this help user experience on your website from a customer’s standpoint, but also makes your site more efficient technically.
Indexing
Another way to condense your website is to noindex specific assets, which can include photos, PDFs, category pages, authors, and more. This can help reduce the number of pages on search engines related to your website that aren’t that relevant to what you want customers to find.
Once you either update your settings in the backend of your content management system, or manually add in the noindex tag on pages, you can resubmit your sitemap to Google and Bing to have them update their results.
Why SEO Is Important
You may think that some of these tasks could be tedious work and really not worth the effort, but in reality, if not done they can have some major impacts on your current rankings in search engines. So no matter if you are condensing your site during a website redesign or due to other changes, these SEO fixes are relevant.
Check Out More Blog Posts
Looking to learn more about SEO? Here are a few posts that may help:
- 8 Best Practices for SEO on WordPress
- How Having a Blog Can Help SEO
- 2020 Website Maintenance Checklist
- 9 Things You Miss While Doing a Website Audit
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