Your New Site Launched – You’re Done Now, Right?

As Scott pointed out in his blog post last month, “website projects are a lot of work!” Once all that work is done and your shiny new site launches, nothing sounds better than just not thinking about your website for a while. Just because the launch was successful, it doesn’t mean you can relax quite yet.

URL’s often change during site builds, especially if using a new ecommerce software or drastically changing your sitemap. When that happens, you can end up with some problems.

Generally, when you launch a new site, your website company should help you with doing 301-redirects. These redirects ensure that users won’t get an error page instead of landing on your new pages.  However, if you have a huge ecommerce or product database with thousands of products, a few are bound to get missed, landing users on a “page not found” error.

The other factor to consider is that any external links concerns search engines. All those external links pass “link juice” to your website that impact the ranking your pages. 301-redirecting passes a portion of that “link juice” to your site, but the BEST thing is having those links go to the new (correct) page.

There are several ways to find links to your site that are in need of updating after a redesign:

• Review all the links in directories you pay to be in. For industrial sites, Thomasnet.com is a biggie – log into your account and make sure those deep links to your site go to the correct URLs.

• Check your web analytics package for a list of other sites that referred visitors to your site over the past 6 months to 1 year.  Hint – start with the ones who sent you the most conversions and traffic.

• Log into your Google Webmaster Tools account and check the  linking domains report. This won’t give you all the links to your site, but you can see a portion of them.

• Also check for any crawl errors in Google Webmaster Tools and look for legitimate sites that have outdated links to your site. Hint – it’s important to do this for several months after your redesign as the data takes a while to get up to date.

• Get a crawl report (like SEOmoz’s Crawl Test) for your new website. This will help you identify outdated links within your site that might not have gotten updated during the build.

OK, so you have identified all these broken links, now what? You work on getting them fixed. Great, more work – just what you wanted to hear, right? Trust me, it’s worth it.

• Update any links on your own website or sub-sites that are incorrect.

• Log into your directory accounts and update the links in every category.

• For sites that you don’t have access to make updates, contact the website owners and politely ask if they can update any links to your site. Make sure to give them the correct URL.

• If you can’t get links updated, then make sure that you have a 301-permanent redirect to the correct page.

By making sure you update links after your new website is redesigned, you’ll ensure visitors get to see that great, new shiny website and you won’t miss opportunities for linking.

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