Speaking of search engines we made some significant upgrades to our CMS and our content in an effort to refine our our search engine effectiveness. The main thing we did was enable a new CMS feature that allows each web page to have a "friendly file name" which produces a short and content rich URL (web page address). For example, a sample URL for a page in our old site used to look something like "www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/10113." These were not a very informative or memorable URLs. Our new site allows each page to be given a friendly file name. So, for example, the URL of this page is www.newfangled.com/new_website. These friendly file names add relevant words to each page's URL improving their search engine relevance. Also, the fewer slashes in a URL, the more weight search engines give to a page when ranking results.

Unfortunately, as a result of renaming every single page with new, better URLs, we had a problem. What happens to all the links already in search engines and all the hard coded links across the internet to our old pages? When people click them they'll get "404 page not found" errors. Believe it or not this was a huge problem and not an easy one to solve. Every solution we came up with created other potential problems. In the end we created a special system that allows us to map old URLs to new ones. So, for example, if you were to find a link on the web somewhere that pointed to our old newsletter "Words Make the Web Work" (whose old URL was www.newfangled.com/contentmgr/showdetails.php/id/6594) our new site will recognize that old URL and produce a customized version of our search page that contains a link to the new page.

We could have just automatically redirected visitors to the new page, but that would potentially confuse search engines and possibly even look like spamming which could get us blacklisted. The way our approach works, the search engines gets a standard "404 page not found" error forcing it to re-index the site. Re-indexing can take some time (in our case about a week or so). But our mapping solution ensures visitors still get to the pages they're clicking to before and after the re-indexing takes place. It did take me a couple days to figure out exactly which old pages mapped to the new ones and to implement the URL map for each instance. But it is a clean solution for search engines and it keeps visitors on track toward their content. It also provides an ongoing mechanism for all the old hard coded links out there on the web.   next >