One of the basic tools in the toolbox of any website builder or basic site administrator is the ability to create redirects, emphasizing on 301 redirects (which signify a permanent redirect). Essentially, we are telling Google, browsers, and anyone interested that the page has changed its address, and we are directing them to the new address.
So far, so good, we can handle 404 errors through direct redirects at the routing level, at the server-side level – for example, in PHP at the server level or in the .htaccess file, and many other ways.
The approach I want to focus on today is through a WordPress site and provide some advanced tips for things worth adopting and also provide tools for advanced users.
Firstly, general management,
You should go to the settings screen and request redirects to be saved for one day.
Also, pay attention to the monitor alone building redirects as a result of changes in addresses – it’s always nice when things happen automatically, isn’t it?
Now that we have a system that really “catches broken links”, we can access it; it’s advisable to do this in parallel with the site manager in the search console:
In the example above, there’s a broken link that was detected, and now I can simply redirect it by editing it (and the advantage is that I don’t need to type the broken address, which can sometimes be very complicated to recover – for example, in cases of gibberish and so on).
Another tip from pros regarding link prevention, it’s really nice that we connected our links to results, effectively preventing an error, but it’s even better to handle these errors proactively, and even better to find recurring patterns. For example, in the next example, I access redirects and look for those that received the most results:
So where are there actually so many pre-broken links on the site?
The search in the attached image shows that results were found in the database from a Mailchimp campaign. Additionally, in the attached image, we can see that even in AdWords ads, there’s a request to send to these links:
In other words – it’s really worthwhile and important not to be lazy and not to settle for just fixing the broken links at the connection level but really try to go back and fix the source of the breakage, especially if it originates from marketing systems we are directly responsible for…