So, here’s the quick story. You start a website. You add pages and delete pages trying to hit the Google sweet spot that brings in traffic. It’s normal to delete or rename as much as half the pages on your site within the first year.
But what about those pages you deleted or renamed. Often they have been indexed by the Google search engine during it’s daily or weekly visits. And if the pages are in the index Google is sending people to those missing pages expecting to find what they are looking for. Only to get an error page. This is very disappointing. Is the person going to stay on your site looking for the missing page? Not likely. Google doesn’t like disappointing people so your site gets moved further and further down in the index. Missing pages can keep your site from improving it’s ranking or even leads to drops in your ranking.
What’s the solution? Set your site up to redirect people to another page if the page they’re looking for isn’t found. This is call a 302 redirect and can be set up using the .htaccess file on your site.
At West 4 we regularly monitor your site for missing pages and create redirects to the renamed page or an alternate page with suitable content. We build this into all the websites that we set up and can add this feature to any website.