In the quest to squeeze out every bit of search engine visibility for your business, take a look at your Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster reports for 404 status errors. You can also find these through third-party audit tools like SEMrush.
404 statuses simply refer to a page that once existed on your website but can no longer be found. Perhaps the page was deleted, or the URL changed; in any event, the page or previous URL is missing – and with it, all the earned search engine equity!
We see these all the time on SEO reports & audits, and by redirecting these dead-end URLs to an active and relevant page, we fix a broken link while transferring the SEO value.
So, here’s how to recapture that lost SEO juice.
Just download all your 404 pages onto a spreadsheet, then add matching URLs in the next column to pages of your website with the highest contextual relevance. Then, research how to redirect the old URLs to the new through 301 redirects.
It is busy work but shouldn’t be too difficult if you’re adventurous. 301 redirect directions for popular websites are linked below.
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