Make sure old links to your site don't display 'Page not found' errors
This guide explains why it is important to set up 301 redirects on your website and how to submit a redirects spreadsheet.
What are 301 redirects for?
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another.
301 redirects send site visitors and search engines to a different URL than the one they originally typed into their browser or selected from a search engine results page.
Why are 301 Redirects important?
You will want to create 301 Redirects if you are launching a new site but are using the same domain as your previous website, as 301 Redirects will allow you to maintain your existing SEO ranking.
Not creating Redirects for your old site URLs will leave certain pages unlinked, making them broken links. This could impact your ranking negatively, as Google looks at the number of broken links on your site as a ranking factor.
Not creating Redirects for your old site URLs could potentially leave broken links on Google Search results, affecting the user experience of your website visitors.
This also means that any links that another website (news sites, articles, etc) have made to those pages will cease to work.
What is a 404 'Page not found' error?
The HTTP 404 Not Found Error means that the webpage you were trying to visit could not be found on the server.
This is usually because either the page has been removed or moved and the URL was not changed accordingly, or the URL has been typed in incorrectly.
What can I do to prevent 404 'Page not found' errors?
In order to prevent this from happening you can redirect an old URL to a new URL. For example, you can redirect your old Artists page, '/artist-list/', to your new one, '/artists/'.
This will prevent errors and help to preserve your search engine rankings.
Uploading redirects
Set up your redirects in your CMS by navigating to SEO Tools > Upload redirects.
In the first column of the table, list as many important URLs for your current site as possible, these should be collected now before your Artlogic website goes live. These URLs could either be copied & pasted from your sitemap, or from a more manual search through Google for 'site:yourdomain.com'.
In the second column, you can list the corresponding URLs to your new Artlogic website.
If you would like to compile your redirects in a spreadsheet first, you can download our template and then use the Paste from Excel button to upload them.