Imagine this: Your business has two successful sites with lots of inbound links from quality sites. Both are content-rich, with long-tail search traffic and Google juice.
One day you realize that for business reasons, you can no longer maintain two separate sites. They have to be combined.
So what do you do?
Shutdown the smaller site, and send all the traffic to a single generic landing page on the new site?
That's exactly what NYTimes.com did recently when it closed IHT.com and replaced it with a global edition of NYTimes.com . If you go to an old article on IHT.com ( http://www.iht.com/articles/2002/05/07/t1_24.php ), you'll end up on a landing page like the one on the right.
Trouble is, that's exactly the wrong thing to do.
From a user's perspective it's a terrible experience. Today, if you click on an old IHT link from a blog post or Wikipedia page, you won't end up on the page you're looking for, you'll end up on the generic landing page. That's a waste of time.
From a business perspective, the NYT is throwing away money -- at least $100,000 every month the links are broken. According to Compete.com, IHT.com was getting over 1.5 million visitors/month before it shut down. If a third of those visitors were from search and direct old links, 500,000 visitors a month are hitting the dead end in the image above, instead of the page they were looking for. To buy that traffic from Google at $.20/click, you'd have to pay $100,000 a month. Add that $100,000 to the value of the SEO authority IHT.com accrues from its 3.9 million inbound links , and you have a sense of the money The Times is leaving on the table.
So what's the right way to shut down a site you own?
Create 301 redirects. If you're moving or shutting down existing pages, make sure you create redirects from your old pages to your new pages. A redirect is a simple rule that forwards all visitors to an old URL (including search engines) to its replacement. The result is that the SEO authority of the old url is transferred to the new url.
301 redirects would have saved The Times the money it's currently loosing with its dead-end landing pages.
The New York Times has a top-notch web team, and this example is probably some sort of management snafu . The landing pages explain that The Times is "in the process of moving IHT articles dating back to 1991 over to NYTimes.com." Hopefully that means the old links will be fixed in the future.
Still, it's an expensive mistake that would have been easy to avoid, and one you probably can't afford to make if you're a smaller business.
Inbound Marketing Blog Feed
Mark Wallace 9:10 AM on May 11, 2009
Very timely post - We are in the midst of a project like this. We are setting up 301 redirects to a user friendly landing page to let search engines and google know about the change while hopefully providing the best user experience with a friendly message. Is that the right thing to do?
jeanmarcthomas 12:14 PM on May 11, 2009
how can such a big site not know about 301's and do such a lousy job ? unbelievable...
Dave Atkins 4:01 PM on May 11, 2009
There is a very handy Wordpress plugin for redirection that will allow you to upload an entire spreadsheet of old to new mappings and configure 301 redirects. We used this at one company to avoid the problem the NYT has stumbled into. One question though...doesn't google re-evaluate the redirected page at some point? The original page had achieved a certain SEO based on its content and all the other magical factors...so in month 1, if you do the 301 redirect, yes, you will maintain and consolidate SEO. But if the page you are sending users to is poorly optimized...or optimized for different keywords, then the original ranking will probably fade. That's why it is good to have a plugin like this tracking the redirects so you can see what is actually being redirected.
If the old site is not on Wordpress, you could write a script...or you could deploy Wordpress plus the plugin to "stand in" for the old site. Kind of a weird thing to do, but it's the $5 solution that would have saved the NYT hundreds of thousands of dollars without having to do any development work.
Malene 5:58 PM on May 11, 2009
Does make you wonder how they could make such a mess of it - but the good thing is the rest of us learn from it.
Chris Cummins 8:07 PM on May 11, 2009
Leave it to the newspaper world to provide yet another example of how not to do something in the digital age.
Kimberley 7:36 PM on May 12, 2009
Though I found it an interesting read, the information provided in the website free design trial is just the preview of the full version correct? What more is there to look forward to?