Attire Accessories - Nov/Dec 2018 (Issue 73)

DAVID FAIRHURST 45 Historical link reclamation David Fairhurst explains all about how to claim back what is rightfully yours Search engines like Google use several different ranking factors to determine where to place pages in search results. These ranking factors can number into the hundreds (in Google’s case), but roughly speaking, these ranking factors come into three main areas: on-site factors, off-site factors and hosting environment. Traditionally, the biggest influence in rankings for Google has been the off-site factors, including links coming into a target website from other websites. These external links have been the core of Google’s ranking algorithm since Larry Page (one of Google’s two founders) proposed the use of external link signals in 1996. The resulting PageRank algorithm, named after Page, is still at the core of the Google search engine, and there’s no reason to think that external links are going to be replaced anytime soon. So external links are important. This creates a potential problem for those wishing to get a brand-new website but also an opportunity for those looking to recover from past mistakes. LOST LINKS? If you’ve ever been in the unfortunate situation where you’ve got a new website and then immediately lost search engine rankings or website traffic, then the following information could be of some real use. When moving from one website technology to another, it’s a fair bet that page URLs on your website will change. For instance, if your old website had URLs of the form http://www.site.com/page.html and your new website had URLs of the form https://www.site.com/page/ you would have to put in a redirect from the old URL to the new URL. If you don’t put redirects in place, then search engines won’t know where to find the new pages and your website will consequently lose search engine rankings and all of the websites linking to http://www. site.com/page.html will now be showing a “not found” error when people (and search engines!) click through from their page to yours. This isn’t good, as it’s a clear signal to search engines like Google that something is terribly wrong. Broken links like this are very bad news and the reason why a website can lose search engine results rapidly if redirection isn’t done properly when a new website is designed or page URLs change. LINK RECLAMATION Thankfully, when redirection isn’t done properly, all is not lost. Google spiders do come back to a website for a long period, looking for missing pages when a redirect isn’t put in place. I’ve seen Google’s search engine spiders visiting for six months after pages have been deleted, which gives you an opportunity to fix the problem of missing redirects, and this isn’t the only advantage of doing this sort of historical link reclamation.