** New website - opinions/advice on seo please! **

[whirlex]

Unfortunately, moving from ekm has caused quite a few dead links with Google. May need a bit more time for this to be crawled fully.

Squeekybee,

to help resolve the problem of 404 errors (broken links) make your self a custome error 404 page...

its a bit of a pain in the arse to set up but at least people will go through to some type of holding page or your home page... I have done one for our site that we are redesigning, although it is not online yet...

a good tutorial/resource is 'A List Apart' or the actual tutorial here

hope this helps...

Ben

[squeakybee]

I've made it bounce to the /acatalog page now - who knows when google will update the links correctly

[wjcampbe]

I would bounce it to acatalog/sitemap.html - may as well give google a head start when they follow the link.

[webyourbusiness]

"bouncing" a 404 to another page can be dodgy if done via meta-redirect - I would recommend 301 redirect via .htaccess for a page that has simply been removed - you can 404 the page using .htaccess to the sitemap directly for "regular" 404s - but if you know a page has gone for ever, 301 it... that's what the status code is for!


If your host supports it, I'd have a DIFFERENT set of .htaccess redirects and error handling inside your acatalog folder than the rest of the site (if you have static or otherwise 'non-actinic' content)...

[squeakybee]

Hi webyourbusiness,

I don't know how to set up the .htaccess on my server. ( using Demon )
Do you know of an easy patch or something?
The problem is google is showing backlinks that are broken eg

"www.squeakybee.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Shop_Ceramic_Mill_Multicolour_Spots_129.html"

should be
"www.squeakybee.co.uk/acatalog/Shop_Ceramic_Mill_Multicolour_Spots_129.html"

( as I changed the parent directory from "online_shop" to "shop" )

[webyourbusiness]

if you can't don't know how to setup .htaccess on your host, call their support line/open a trouble ticket, or just browse their helpdesk.

When I used Demon as an ISP (many years ago), their helpdesk was ok... you could find things... but that was more than 6 years ago when I was living in the UK.