At some point in your website life, you may need to put your website through a re-build, taking your content from one platform to another. Or, you may have decided to update some web addresses within your site as an attempt to better optimise your content for a range of keywords you’re targeting.
If you’ve recently had a rebuild
If you’ve had a re-build, it’s extremely important to check that that all your current pages and content have being brought across as well as checking to see if the pages’ web addresses have changed somewhat.
If not, then you will possibly log into Google Analytics one day and see something similar to this;
If you’ve recently amended some URLs
If you have (or someone else has) recently gone through your site and amended page URLs to improve your onsite SEO, then it’s important you check that your platform automatically redirects anyone trying to access the old URL.
If your website is an essential part of your business, then you can imagine the potential impact of losing traffic, whether be 50 visits or 5,000 visitors.
How to check that it’s been done
There are a couple of tests that you can use for this, in fact I actually use both ways because it’s very important it is done correctly:
Using Webmaster Tools
Each search engine has their own Webmaster Tools, you’re probably more familiar with the Google one. Taking Google as an example;
Log into your Webmaster tools account just before you go live and head over to the “Crawl” then “Crawl Errors” section.
If you’re happy to, remove any crawl errors that are there currently by marking them all as fixed.
Then, launch your website and keep checking Webmaster tools every couple of days.
If Google has encountered any issues while trying to reach pages, then this is the place they will tell you.
Using Screaming Frog SEO Spider
This will give you instant results and transparency, if used correctly of course. The free version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs but the paid version is only around £100 per year and gives your unlimited access.
Before going live, crawl the old website and export the internal HTML data in a .csv format. This will give you a list of all the URLs that the spider has been able to crawl.
Launch your website then head back over to the Spider, import the site map within “Mode > List” and start a new crawl
In the column labelled “Response Code”, look for the 404 responses. These page addresses are the ones that do not exist on your current site and have no redirect in place.
With both checks, if you see any pages that are definitely on your new site, chances are the URL format has changed and you’ll just need to pop a 301 Redirect in.
Hope this helps; if you have any questions then feel free to comment below or get is touch on Twitter @SpiralMediaLtd.
Phil Kelsey is the Managing Director of Spiral Media, a Lincoln-based website and online marketing consultancy. Phil and his creative team create online strategies for their clients by combining their design, development and online marketing skills, which involves search engine optimisation to increase traffic and conversions.
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A 38-year-old man from a North Lincolnshire village charged with murder will face an eight-day trial later this year.
Emergency services were called at 4.23am on Saturday, July 2 to reports that a man was seriously injured on South Parade in central Doncaster.
The 28-year-old victim was taken to hospital but was sadly pronounced dead a short time later.
A post-mortem examination found that he died of injuries to his head, chest and abdomen.
Formal identification of the victim is yet to take place, South Yorkshire Police said earlier this week.
Steven Ling, 38, of Park Drain, Westwoodside in North Lincolnshire, has been charged with murder and was remanded in custody to appear at Doncaster Magistrates Court on Monday, July 4.
Ling later appeared at Sheffield Crown Court on Tuesday, July 5 for a plea and trial preparation hearing.
No pleas were entered during the hearing, but an eight-day trial was set for November 28, 2022. Ling has now been remanded into custody until the next hearing.
The Lincolnite went on a ride-along with a Lincolnshire Police officer from the force’s Roads Policing Unit (RPU), which aims to disrupt criminals’ use of the roads and reduce the number of serious and fatal accidents.
The team will support the county response including local policing, neighbourhood policing and criminal investigation too.
Operations first began in Grantham in January this year and started in Louth earlier this week with a sergeant and nine PCs based in both locations.
The Lincolnite went out on a ride-along with PC Rich Precious from Lincolnshire Police’s Roads Policing Unit. | Photo: Steve Smailes for The Lincolnite
PC Rich Precious has been a police officer for 22 years after joining the force in 2000 and he recently rejoined the Roads Policing Unit, working out of Louth.
PC Precious, who also previously worked as a family liaison officer for road deaths for 16 years, took The Lincolnite out in his police car to the A1 up to Colsteworth and then back to Grantham. He described that particular area as “one of the main arterial routes that goes through Lincolnshire”.
PC Rich Precious driving down the A1 up to Colsterworth. | Photo: Steve Smailes for The Lincolnite
Speaking about the new Roads Policing Unit, he said: “It’s intelligence led policing, it’s targeted policing in areas that have been underrepresented in terms of police presence, on the roads certainly, over a number of years.
“We’re hoping that the development of this unit will help address that balance, and look towards using the ANPR system to prevent criminals’ use of the road, and to identify key areas or routes where there’s a high percentage of people killed or seriously injured on the road, what we commonly refer to as KSI.
PC Precious is helping to keep the roads safer in Lincolnshire. | Photo: Steve Smailes for The Lincolnite
When asked if he thinks the new team will help reduce the number of serious and fatal accidents in the county, he added: “That’s what the the unit designed for. Sadly, in Lincolnshire our road network does seem to incur a number of those KSI accidents year on year, and we need to reduce that.
“I’ve worked additionally in my roles as a family liaison officer on road death for 16 years, so I’ve seen first hand the impact that road death has on families and victims families.
“I know it’s important that we try and reduce those because, it’s very sad to see how a fatal road traffic collision can affect a family and the victims of that family.”
Marc Gee, Inspector for Lincolnshire Police’s Roads Policing Unit. | Photo: Steve Smailes for The Lincolnite
Marc Gee, Inspector for the Roads Policing Unit, told The Lincolnite: “Every day there will be officers on duty from both teams and they’ll cover the whole county or the county’s roads.
“Eventually, we’ll have nine police cars and we’ve got six motorbikes. We’ll be utilising them with as many officers as we can every day basically to make our roads safer and enforce against the criminals who feel like it’s okay to come into the county and use our road for criminal purposes.”
Lincolnshire’s Police and Crime Commissioner Marc Jones at the launch of the force’s Roads Policing Unit. | Photo: Steve Smailes for The Lincolnite
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