One problem that I’ll frequently hear when gathering requirements for a Search Audit, is that a site used to rank well for a particular term, but no longer does.  I’ll ask what content they had that used to rank for that term.  Sometimes I’ll hear that it was either pages that were taken down due to redesign, or due to seasonal content.  The most common response is – “We don’t know, that’s why we called you in.”

In those cases, a simple 301 redirect could be used to preserve those rankings by redirecting the page equity to a page with similar or like content.  What you don’t want to do is have a 404 page (always No-Index them) or some other stop page be presented to the user.

In the example below, Oxfam had a page calling for donations for the 2004 Asian Earthquake.  This campaign is now over.  So, what did they do with that page?  They changed the title to “Campaign Expired” and presented a “This Campaign has Expired” page to the user.  As you can see, this doesn’t look good in their search results.

What should Oxfam have done?  I would recommend that they put together a landing page that talked about the results of the 2004 campaign which would be linked to current campaigns – with strong calls to donate on the page.  This lets people see what’s been done with money in the past, gives them a chance to donate to wherever the need is now (opening up the previously closed conversion funnel), and preserves the rankings by providing like, relevant content for the search.

Filed under: Non-Profits, SEO on Monday, May 19th, 2008 by Simon Heseltine | No Comments
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.