This is unusual though, but accidents are inevitable. I’m been through such a bitter incident recently and experienced a heavy loss of back links, comments, reputation and the whole world, I mean it.
Backlinks
For the last three months I was deeply involved in reading blog post on ‘blogging’ niche and did not left any stone unturned. None of my comments were just for the sake but real, genuine and discussing pieces that certainly have potential values. None of them were considered spam and each were published with links pointing back to my blog.I was equally active in forums, and social media. You can understand how deeply I was involved in link building. I got one back link (in most cases two from those that had commentLuv enabled) to my site from those comments. I hope you can realize the value and importance of those links that point to this blog.
Community
Building a community is not an overnight joy. You need to put a consistent effort in identifying, communicating and help everybody to expect them reciprocate. I’d got some nice friends in this field and some returning readers. All of a sudden they find that ICT Trends is not working!
Commenting system and blogging platform
IntenseDebate commenting system because my blog was in blogger.com platform and it was the IntenseDebate alone that supported commentLuv for blogger blog. Why blogger.com blog? This is the only platform that supports your own domain name for free. Blogger.com does all the hosting for you and you can publish your blog with top level domain name.
Since I was just started, there was a caravan of experience waiting for me to be explored! But I am smart. I learned in very short time. I must use WordPress platform if I’m really going to blogging. You must host comments yourself if you really value them. Comments are precious gems to any blog.
Opportunities and Challenges
There was a big dilemma – should I jump to change both the hosting and blogging platform or stick with whatever I had. Finally, I decided, accidents are better earlier!
Consequences? as I mentioned earlier. Now I have a nice blog. I am more powerful in SEO my blog. I have more control and the options are far more flexible and wide open compared to whatever I had. Worst thing is, I have lost all those comments that are still dumped in IntenseDebate account - unattended. They could not be imported into WordPress because all those posts now have a different URL than they had in blogger platform. I’m still looking for ways to import those comments into new blogging platform.
Now, ICT Trends became a new blog. A new hosting, new platform and a new theme, all fresh posts without any comment. Because every posts now have different URL, all those comment links that pointed to posts in old URL are no more valid. All those internal link that points to other posts are broken. Any user when clicks the links will get a 404 page ‘Not Found’, disappointing! Search engines that crawls through the links will no more reward the link Juice to those old posts with new URL. So, an immediate solution to protect the link juice is urgent.
First Aid for Broken Links
What should you do immediately if you have broken links in your blog?
Stop Showing 404 Error Page
First and foremost stop showing ‘Not Found’ page. Yes! it is possible. You can find plugin that redirects to all those 404 Errors to some post or your home page. That way you can save your link juice spilled out of your cup. Plugins like Link Juice Keeper can help you on this.
Identify Broken Links in Your Posts
Second, analyze broken links in your posts. You must know which links are broken in which of the posts. Yes, I know, it will hardly be possible to read all the posts again and verify every links. But to save your life, the good news is, you can find plugin like Broken Link Remover that analyzes for you and provides a list of broken links.
Remove Broken Links till They Are Fixed
Its the worst to link to something that is not available than no links in your post. Remove all those links that are broken till you fix them back. Find a plugin that hides the links of broken and redirected links. Broken Link Remover too has this option you can enable that will remove just the links from those anchor links that are broken.
Fix Broken Internal Links
Now its the time to fix your internal broken links. The plugin lists of broken links and you can directly jump to those invalid link and fix it with new URL. This way you will maintain the integrity of internal links in your blog.
.htaccess Rule
Write URL rewrite rule in .htaccess file that redirects the request to your old URL into new URL. This way you can show the correct page though they clicked on old URL. This way you can save the benefit of external link.
After doing all this you will be retaining your PageRank and will save yourself from heavy loss due to changing hosting or platform or any other reason that resulted your URLs changed!
Happy Blogging!
Related posts:
Twitter: blondishnet
says:
There is a plugin that is called Redirection that can help with redirecting. However the htaccess rule is probably the best.
Although it might be a pain, use Google Webmaster Tools and it can check for dead links. You can go and remove those immediately.
I am not much for installing a lot of programs as it drives up the database usage. For those on shared hosting plans, all are give a limit on data resources that a person can use. This is something that these webhosts do not tell people up front.
Nile´s last blog ..Social Media 101: Your Business Cannot Rely On Only Social Networking
Twitter: icttrends
says:
I found a plugging ‘broken link remover’ that just removes the hyperlink from the text it is linked. This is good that the anchor is no more pointing to that broken link and still the story is intact.
I also feel that data resources are limited by hosts. I find sometimes the site loads unusually slow.
Twitter: roezer
says:
I am using a Broken links Plugin and it seems quite effective I had many links to older blogging friends that I knew on Blogspot and only to find out that they are all closed blogs not because they were short term bloggers and just deleted or changed the name of their blogspot blog. The plugin is called Broken links checker and it works well you can get it here.
http://w-shadow.com/blog/2007/08/05/broken-link-checker-for-wordpress/
I had subscribed to your blog but I keep forgeting to check google readerbecause of twitter and I love the new Theme
Twitter: icttrends
says:
I switched to WordPress and still needs to settle lot of things before I am really ready to go. Thank you for the link, it really helps.
Very informative sir, This actually helped me alot …thnx for this kind of informative post…
Twitter: icttrends
says:
Welcome to my blog. I’m happy you wrote something.
Hey
Is there something unusual with your blog or with my Internet Explorer? I keep clicking on the rss feed and I get some strange code from the browser. The feed content shows many strange characters and it looks messy. Maybe it’s from the new plugin I set up to get the subscription feeds into a custom way. Weird, never the less.
Take Care!
Twitter: icttrends
says:
It is perfectly fine on this end. Why don’t you use Firefox or Chrome. They are much better than that stinking IE. I checked with Internet Explorer too and its fine. I guess you need to fix your IE?
I think that if you have a blog, then it is what you need.
Tell people about something, someone is advertising, to somebody else for something else.
Personally, I think so.
Here I have a blog about my travels, but I can not share them with people, because somebody would write that this is spam.
A hoster will also kick
Twitter: icttrends
says:
You comment was caught by Aksimet, I don’t know why. If it was due to the previous actions.
Telling people about something is advertising. But advertising is not spamming. Excessive irrelevant advertising might be counted as spamming though.
Hey, cheers to the author of this article, been on a search for some way of doing it, but could not find it anywhere. Thanks!
I appreciate you for this specific intriguing article! I should say also possess a web log and i’m questioning, how can i get a hold of this kind of wonderful theme like your own?
dont forget ur alt tags to make use of your links when redirecting to homepage.
Thanks for the info that you provide I always experience that broken links.Now I have option to try so that I will not experience that in my site.
Really nice to have the chance to read a good quality article with useful details on topics that a lot are interested on. The fact that the data stated are all first hand based on actual experiences even help more. Go on doing what you do best as we enjoy reading your work.