Hey guys, this week’s WordPress tip is aimed at people who have just re-designed their site – and of course, have built it using the awesome WordPress CMS.
Your old site probably has a whole heap of listings on Google’s search engine. You don’t want the links that appear for your old site within the Google search listings to become links that lead to a 404 error page on your new site, it’s not a good look.
So, what do we do, first, you are best to do a Google search for current listings, do this by typing the following into the Google search bar: site:yourURL – replace ‘yourURL’ with, well your URL!
Now, Google will spit out all your search listing that it has in it’s mammoth database. Take the time and copy and paste the different URLs from the listing into a Google Doc file or text doc of some sort.
Next, download a re-drirection plugin on your WordPress site – I like to use Redirection you can find it here.
Once you have installed the plugin, open it up and start re-directing. Add your old site listings and re-direct them to a corresponding page if there is one, if not, just re-direct the page to the home page. Easy!
Another good idea is to add a custom 404 error page with a bit of creativity, check these out:
http://www.lego.com/404notfound
http://www.limpfish.com/404
You can get a plugin to do this as well! Click here.
