Keith Shirley

Techcentral.ie has redesigned their website. It can’t be easy to do with a site that has such a huge amount of info on there. On the other hand – you’d expect that a website that covers IT issues in such detail would know how to do it right. The question then is, why did my old bookmarks break? It’s not a big deal to setup a proper redirect for your webpages. Having gone to a lot of effort to get your pages as high as possible in Google or Yahoo the last thing you want to do is throw it all away. Moving pages without a proper redirect is like changing the names of all your products and not giving your customers a way to find the new names. If they ask for it you’d just say – sorry – we don’t have that anymore – without explaining that the name has changed. 

You can redirect in multiple ways:

•  Use the REFRESH tag in html. While this will technically allow the old page to be redirected to the new one – it’s not recommended. Many search engines are very wary of this as it can be used to try and trick them. The only good point is you can warn your customers that the page has moved.

• Use the HTTP 301 status code to set a permanent redirection. For every item that is loaded from the web server a status code is
  sent back. In this case the server is politely saying the page has moved to a new place and gives the new address. The search engines will then update their links so that the new link is used. All the page ranking for the old page is saved.

The only issues left are links from outside websites that point to the old page. You can’t just ignore them as they are part of the reason you got the good ranking in the first place. I’m open to suggestions but the only solution I know of is to try and contact the content owners to change the link. This is not an easy process. For that reason I normally suggest that you keep the redirection in place for as long as possible.