Too late to setup a 301 redirect?

[Spinethetic]

I have a site that is about 2 years old, I am in the middle of the third page structure because I am transfering everything over to WordPress format and am setting up about 300 '301' redirects, which is to say the least, a bit time consuming :P

However I am finding backlinks to pages of the first page structure I setup when I registered the domain and all this time I never got around to setting up 301 redirects when I did the second page structure about a year ago.

So I'am wondering if it is already too late (search optomization-wise) to make 301 redirects for all those initial backlinks. I'am still going to set them up so those people clicking those links dont get a 404 error.

But I'am curious as to the search aspect of this.

Thanks!

~Ross

[ramone_johnny]

I wonder if its possible to set a wildcard entry to redirect any unknowns to your home page by default?

[Spinethetic]

Though I am wondering, now that I think about it,

since all wordpress content is dynamically served via database based on the URL, which is mod_rewrite by .htaccess, is a 404 alert even sent through the header?

[JamesRad]

Hi
What about using wordpress to set up a custom 404 page for the rest of the old phase 1 urls that you haven't redirected.

This could benefit visitors pointing them to the correct page, can you tell from your web stats are you getting traffic from these old links is your 404 access high?

Alternativly if its just link juice and from an SEO angle couldn't you set up custom pages for these Urls on to your domain even if its just a templete page with list of areas and control the outbound links hopefully gaining PR and backlinks.

Not sure if that theory works fully but a live back link has to bring some benefit to your site.

I wonder how many more people don't redirect old backlinks, check the stats for your website and see what the 404 error page hit count is. Just be careful when reading the results to differentiate between Bots crawling your site and real visitors.

Hope this helps

james

[Spinethetic]

Yeah I get a steady stream of about 200 unique visitors per day, Most of them from backlinks of the second page structure, however I get consistent hits daily from old first page structure backlinks, even though I only had a few of them since I dident really know much about marketing at the time.

For the most part i had the site up just for something to do on the net in my spare time, mostly spirituality, complex systems theory and such like that, so I never really payed attention to my 404 traffic.

I went almost 270 days without posting anything onto the site and I am still seeing plenty of traffic, though dipped down about 25% since way back when.

Now I'am paying attention to my stat log over the past year, figuring out what urls to 301 redirect to the new corresponding article, and I do indeed see a LOT of 404 traffic (though a significant portion of the visitors would use the Google Site search form to find the article anyway :-D)

Of about 300 articles, I only have about 15 left to reoppriate, and I probably won't get around to finishing them up until tomarrow because my webhost has been emailing me saying that such a surge of content being put into the database over a small period of time looks suspicious.

I've decided just to 301 all of the first and second page structures to their corresponding third page structures and just see what happens.

I think it must be doing something right because over the past two days I've made a little over $40 in Adsense earnings!; compared to the $.60 average per day for the past 200 some days from that site, I think I'll figure out what else I can do for keywords etc ...

[JamesRad]

Just shows the amount that can be earnt from recycling old url's and traffic.

Well worth doing.