Introduction

When a business is thinking about investing in SEO, normally they are bombarded by tons of technical jargon.

The good quality marketing agencies, well they normally will be able to explain things in a crystal-clear fashion.

However, unfortunately there are still some agencies that don’t explain things that well. We are not one of those agencies, so if your struggling to understand what a 301-redirect means, well you will find the answer here.

404 pages

You should aim to minimise, or eradicate the number of 404 pages on your website. If your wondering what a 404 page is, its basically a broken link.

So have you ever been searching to find a product, perhaps a certain model of mobile phone, and you find the one you want, yet clicking on the link didn’t work?

Well, you’ve just clicked a broken link, or as us SEO’s call them you’ve landed on a 404 page. Your website designer, or your marketing agency should fix these.

And there are many reasons why a 404 page should be fixed, one of the most obvious is it doesn’t help your customers, secondly any good quality backlinks that were pointing to that page, well  they will be rendered useless.

That’s to say the link juice that is sent to that page, well it will be lost.

Now if you talk to any digital marketing agency, they will tell you that backlinks are a really important ranking signal. That’s if the backlinks are of a good quality, so in terms of SEO its really important to make sure that backlinks are pointing towards a page on your website that works.

Permanent redirects

There are all sorts of reasons why a business may use a 301 redirect, the most common reason that we find is that the business no longer stocks that item.

However instead of just deleting that item, your website designer may want to implement a permanent redirect to another item, this permanent redirect is called a 301-redirect.

Backlinks

You may already know that over 200 signals are calculated by Google’s algorithm. The websites with the best ranking signals, well they rank at the top.

However, not all ranking signals are worth the same. Many online marketing agencies believe that backlinks are one of the most important signals.

So, if your website has loads of 404 pages, and these pages have backlinks leading to those pages, well the link juice will not pass through.

Which basically means, unless the seo consultant implements 301-redirects those backlinks are pretty much useless.

Which is why sometimes some businesses can drop in terms of where they rank, because they no longer have backlinks leading to the right pages.

Google Search Console

Your business can use Google Search Console, that’s in order to see which urls turn up with 404 errors.

To do this you must click link report.

How we can help

Whether you run a global business, or a local business we will be able to help you by offering white hat seo.

To obtain a quote, why not give us a ring?