Clean Up Links to Increase Page Rank

Broken links can be silently killing your page rank if you’re not careful. It’s easier than you think to “dirty-up” your site with broken links.

Search engines see bad links as a sign of unreliability and penalize your page rank for it. If you are a blogger who constantly adds inter-site references within your posts like I do, it’s easy to let a bad link or two slip through the cracks.

Awhile back, I started making what I thought were improvements to my site. It turns out that Google didn’t see it that way. I went from a page rank of 6 to a rank of 0 in just a couple of days! It wasn’t until I spent hours and hours of my life on website surgery that I got it back, but I’ll never see those hours again.

Bad Publicity

Not only does it affect your page rank, but it turns off potential readers to your site. The last thing you want is a potential reader, excited about a link they found on someone else’s site, finding a 404 error page when they reach your site. You might not ever see that reader again.

This guide will help you to clean up your links to maintain a sparkling page rank. We’ll start with ways to avoid breaking links, and follow up with what do with ones that are already broken.

What Not to Do

As a general rule in my life, I tend to learn things the hard way. That’s good for you because you can learn from my mistakes. I paid the “stupid tax” so you don’t have to. Take it from me, don’t do the following things!

1. Never Change Your Permalinks

As soon as your site goes live on the internet, search engine crawlers are soon to find it. Once they have mapped your site, they will get angry with you if they can’t find something on their map when they return. Do yourself a favor and choose your permalink strategy before your site goes live.

This is the best possible permalink strategy in my opinion:

http://yourURL.com/postname

It’s short and sweet and easy for other people to reference. Once you start adding a bunch of forward-slashes and directories, I lose interest.

To designate this strategy in WordPress, click permalinks under the options menu. Click the custom radio button and add /%postname%/ in the text field.

You must have a .htaccess file in order for this to work. If you don’t have one, WordPress will let you know after you submit your permalink changes. Just create a blank document titled .htaccess, copy the text that WordPress gives you, and paste it into the document.

Upload the document to the directory where your blog resides. Some servers take a few minutes to recognize the new permalinks.

While you should never change your actual permalinks, there is a sneaky way around this. There’s a plugin available that will redirect visitors that were searching for your old links to your new links. It’s called Dean’s Permalinks Migration.

This is your get-out-of-jail-free card if you started with a bad permalink strategy and need to change it.

2. Never Change or Delete Categories

It may seem innocent to change your category strategy from time to time, but beware. Every category has an archive permalink which is indexed by search engines. If you don’t like a category anymore, you might consider hiding it in your category lists, but don’t delete it.

Instructions for this can be found in the Wordpess Template Tag Directory.

3. Never Delete Posts.

A blog is very much like a newspaper. Once something is published, it’s out there. The best you can do to change something you don’t like is to publish an update or correction.

What To Do

The best way to start edging up your Google page rank is to get on the inside. Set up an account with Google Webmaster Tools.

This is your direct line of communication with Google. Instead of waiting around for Google bots to index your site and hoping they get it right, you can send them where you want them.

The first thing you should do when you set up an account is show Google where your Google site map is. If you don’t have one, you can create one easily by installing this plugin.

A lot of people don’t believe in Google site maps, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.

Find Your Broken Links

Once your account is set up, and it has collected some data, you can check to see if Google ran into any errors while crawling your site. Just click on your website and select Not Found under Web Crawl Errors. If Google found any bad links, they will show up here.

You should also check your server logging software for the most detailed report. I use Logaholic, and it’s just okay for the price. I’m sure I could do better, but it gets the job done.

Fix Your Links

If you can isolate which link caused the mistake, you can fix it, but it isn’t always easy. The link might be out of your control, such as on someone else’s site or on a page that can’t be changed.

As a safety precaution, you should always include a 301 redirect rule in addition to fixing the link.

301 Redirects

I’m not ashamed to say it… I love 301 redirects. They are a lifesaver for constant website fiddlers.

A 301 redirect is a piece of code in your .htaccess file that redirects a user looking for one link to the link of your choice. One excellent way to use this function is to redirect people from your broken links to your good links.

Here’s how to do it:

Before you do anything, make sure to back up your entire site including your database. Take it from me, it can make your heart stop to try and access your site after you changed something, and only get an error message.

In addition to my site/database backup, I like to keep an extra copy of my .htaccess file on hand while I’m working on it for easy reference if I need to revert back to an older version.

Add this code to the beginning of your .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

redirect 301 /badlink http://URL/goodlink
redirect 301 /badlink2 http://URL/goodlink2
redirect 301 /badlink3 http://URL/goodlink3

Each redirect 301 gets it’s own line. If the text wraps, just make sure that each line starts with “redirect 301.”

Here is an example of a redirect I use to cover for a misspelling. I have a link to paradigm somewhere that should be paradigms.

redirect 301 /principles/paradigm http://geniustypes.com/principles/paradigms

The text wraps in this post, but is actually on one line. Try it by clicking this bad link and watch how it redirects you to the good link.

You can add as many redirects as you need to make sure you’re covered.

This should help get you on the way to page rank bliss! Now all you have to do is create some quality content.