Meredith's Husband: 0:42

Hey, this is Meredith husband, I've got some SEO advice for you. But I'm gonna keep it really simple so that you can understand it. So make sense. And most importantly, so you can actually use See, number one mistake mistake, a mistake that I see very often. Oh, okay. And it can have some pretty negative impact on rankings. Oh, I actually see it. I see it very often, all the time, to be honest. It's like I see your eyes. But I get paid because I then tell people about it and they fix it. So that's,

Meredith: 1:19

that's, that's why you do what you do.

Meredith's Husband: 1:22

So that mistake, yes. Is changing URLs. Oh, changing URLs, changing your domain name. Also, we would do this. But changing your domain name is actually not that common doesn't happen that often.

Meredith: 1:34

Yeah, unless you go to like Tico feet to burn smuggling photography,

Meredith's Husband: 1:41

that domain is taken, by the way, burns, burns, middlemen, if you're thinking about, yeah, my alter ego. Anyway, what happens very often, is that people remove old content, especially from blogs. Yeah. Or if you're relaunching a site, yeah. You said, you know, everybody updates their site every few years. Yeah, typically,

Meredith: 2:01

if you're changing from wedding photography to Twinkletoes, photography,

Meredith's Husband: 2:06

no, like, if you'd like you just relaunched your site little while ago. Often, when you do that, your URLs are gonna change your URLs, your URLs are not going to be the same when you're creating a new site. Oh, very usually not like some of the some of the pages will be. But you have to know in advance that this is something to avoid. And most people don't know that. Even web designers don't. And a lot of web designers don't know that. Some do. But some don't. Because that if they don't it would cause it causes an immediate loss in rankings. Excellent. Yeah. And I will say that even though you may not need this, right now, if you're listening this, you're like, Well, I'm not thinking of changing my domain. And I'm not planning to remove any blocks. I'm going to try to keep this short. Yes. So you can just listen anyway, and remember it and then when this does come up, then you think Oh, yes.

Meredith: 2:56

Wait a second. Yes. I

Meredith's Husband: 2:58

mentioned this. I'm not supposed to do that.

Meredith: 3:01

No, and I've put it in the back of my pocket head.

Meredith's Husband: 3:04

Right. Okay. So the reasons why people remove blogs. Yeah, a website relaunch is one other times, it's a stinky, it's not stinky, but it gets old. Like, if you have a blog that you wrote, eight years ago about almost anything, there's probably a pretty good chance that it's outdated at this point.

Meredith: 3:25

That will never be AI. And I'll tell you why.

Meredith's Husband: 3:28

So when that happen, when you're looking at your blog, and you think, Oh, this is old, I don't really want it on my website anymore. Think twice about removing it, man before you before you just delete it. Yeah. Think think,

Meredith: 3:41

can you see it? And

Meredith's Husband: 3:43

you up? Can you update it? Can you rewrite it? It? Can you create a more modern version of it? And then give it a new published date? That's actually good for SEO? That's, that's something you can do. It's a positive for us. Yeah.

Meredith: 3:55

Okay, kind of clean up and dress up your old content? Yes. Read some lipstick on it. Yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 4:05

And if it's something you really hate, you can't update it. It's just really no longer relevant, or it's something you don't offer anymore, or whatever, you need to remove it. You need to take a few steps just to protect yourself against any loss.

Meredith: 4:17

Any rank. Okay, so not just delete and

Meredith's Husband: 4:20

write. Yeah, don't do that's the problem. Okay. And the reason that this is a problem for SEO. So let's say you have a website, and I have a website, okay. Like, let's just, yeah, we do. Both have websites talking. So let's say I were to link to your website, I'm going to link to your to some article on your blog. Thank you from my own blog. Now, we've talked a lot about linking and how valuable links are for SEO, what's happening when I link from my blog to your blog, is I'm passing some SEO value from my site to yours. Thank you, the more, the more valuable my site is, the more value I can pass to your site. But what happens? You're welcome. What happens when you then remove that blog that I'm linking to, oh,

Meredith: 5:07

then that's a bad thing. It goes to nowhere, goes to a bad code.

Meredith's Husband: 5:12

It goes to a bad code, it goes to a 404. It ends up with a 404 finished, you don't get punished, punished, but me know eventually, eventually what's what's going to happen is I'm going to say, Hey, I'm going to notice if I'm using sem rush, hey, some of the links on my site are broken. I'm gonna see oh, this page that I was linking to on your site is no longer there exists I'm going to remove that link. But even before that happens when once rankings could go down, then they will they've probably already gone down. Because what happens is the day that you remove that blog, the SEO value that I was sending to your site by linking to that blog is gone. It goes, it loses exactly 100.0% of the value.

Meredith: 5:54

Wow. Yeah, quickly.

Meredith's Husband: 5:57

So you can imagine if you do like many times, I've seen websites relaunched, and all the URLs change except for the homepage. And they wonder what, you know, month later, why did our organic traffic or organic traffic, organic traffic, the traffic dropped, the traffic dropped by 80%. This is realistic, like you can lose, imagine, if you're getting 1000s of organic visits per month, all of a sudden, you're just getting a couple 100 That can happen. So think twice about removing blocks before you do it. If you do need to do it. Yeah, that's my next question. Here's, here's the steps you need to take, okay, get your pencils ready, you need to have a 301 redirect. That's a 301 redirect. What's that? And what that is, is it's just a little message that you're telling you're giving to search engines, hey, this page that used to be here, I moved it, it's now over here, I want anybody who tries to go to this old page, I want them to go to this new page instead and be redirected. And also I want the any SEO value that was coming into this old page to be redirected to this other page, who the what? So,

Meredith: 7:12

so my N E S, O,

Meredith's Husband: 7:14

O, ne, ne, ne, SEO,

Meredith: 7:17

I was like, what is m e s, e, oh,

Meredith's Husband: 7:21

sorry, everybody. Now, it's just me, the so the SEO value that I was passing to your site with that link, you're going to redirect to a different page. Now, it's not 100%. When you do that, you can't keep 100% of that SEO value, you're going to lose about 20% of that value. Okay, which is why I said, Hey, think twice before you remove it. If you need to remove it, just be aware of any links going to that page, you're gonna lose some of the value. And so

Meredith: 7:47

can you? Is there a way before you delete the link or upgrade? Or who the what? That you can check? Is anybody even linking to this?

Meredith's Husband: 7:57

Yeah, you can, you can use SEMrush. Okay, you can log in and right. That's like the opening page of sem rush. If you just paste in your domain? Yeah, it's going to tell you all the links, not all, but it's going to, it's going to tell you the majority of the links pointing to your site, and you can just go see, does anybody linked to that page?

Meredith: 8:16

Okay, so then if nobody links to that page, and you delete it, are there consequences?

Meredith's Husband: 8:23

There could still be consequences, there's probably going to be less, okay. There may still be links out there that SEMrush hasn't captured, right? There may people may have bookmarked it. It may be on social media, it may be an email, like people could still end up on a 404. And that's not great. So that's why

Meredith: 8:39

I've done that I've had I've, I've gone and seen old pages that I've linked to when I click it, and then it says the 404 Yeah,

Meredith's Husband: 8:47

and it's annoying. It's not it's not impressive.

Meredith: 8:50

Also, sometimes the websites just no longer exist. Yes. Well, yeah.

Meredith's Husband: 8:55

I mean, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so you

Meredith: 8:58

create the positivity,

Meredith's Husband: 9:01

a 301 redirect. And there are different ways to do this. And I would say, if you're on say Squarespace, just go to Google and type in 301 redirect, Squarespace. Squarespace has a blog, they'll tell you exactly how to do it. Same thing with Wix or show it or WordPress is a little different WordPress, you can do it with a plugin. And so it depends on what plugins you're using. Often, your SEO plugin will have a 3301 redirect option. Sometimes I know enough for a few different SEO plugins, you need the paid version to use the 301. Fair enough. So in that case, if you're not paying for Yoast, or All In One SEO plugin, then just go search for a new plugin, go to your plugins, go to install new, do a search and just type in 301 redirect. And there's a handful of them. They're all pretty much the same. This is a very easy thing to do. So you don't really need to worry much about the quality of a plugin. Just look for one with a gut up a lot of good reviews. A lot of got good reviews, a lot of guns. Yes. And use that and they're very simple to use. So then, yeah, so now so now you are ready to create your 301 redirect the first the I guess the next step, remove the block. Okay, take it offline. Yeah, make it if you're in WordPress, make it a draft or delete it or, or whatever. But make it so it's no longer available so that you cannot get to it. If you were to navigate. If you're trying to go to that URL, it's not there anymore. Oh And then you publish that 301 redirect, you make you do whatever the instructions are for Squarespace. beforehand, before you remove the blog post, just have your three or one prepared. Okay, it's just like it's just, it's just a line of text, it's just the line of text that you're going to paste somewhere, just have a text editor open and write it. And then before you actually place it, remove the block. So you remove the blog, then you copy and paste the 301 into the Squarespace setting where you were the blog where the Squarespace tells you to do it, yes, then like that's 90% of it. That's the that's the most important stuff, the only chocolate, if you want to then make sure that your remaining SEO is as good as possible. Yeah, go to sem rush, or whatever you're using to do your SEO Site Audit, and run an audit. And it will probably come back and find a Maybe one, maybe two, maybe zero, but it's going to come back with an issue called permanent redirects. Okay. And what that means is that it's going to find all the links on your site that used to link to that blog. And it's gonna say, Hey, you're linking to a, something that you're then redirecting. So then you go to those links in your site, and you change them, you either remove them, because that blog is no longer there. Right? Or you link to

Meredith: 11:58

another better something else. Yes. Right. Okay. I'm kind of with us. I say the only like, I lost, I left some luggage behind. So not entirely here. I feel like I skipped someplace when I some luggage is still back there. But I'm mostly here. Okay, well, let's keep keep going. Let's keep going on the travel.

Meredith's Husband: 12:18

The only thing, the only other thing you need to worry about and you don't need to worry about but it's when you are placing that 301. So you're going to need to give it a new URL. So if somebody tries to go to that old blog, you need to give them a new place to go. Because you want to keep them. Yeah, very rarely. Are you going to want to make that your homepage. If it's a blog, yeah, that you removing, then lead those people to the main blog page. There we go. Yeah, not your homepage.

Meredith: 12:46

There we go. And then you can see it's like you're in the train station. And you're looking up at the schedule thing. And you can go, oh, wait, where do I want to go? Now, since I'm here, and I have all these options? No,

Meredith's Husband: 13:00

you're just you're just sending set? You're not asking them where they want it. You're just sending them to someplace?

Meredith: 13:04

Yeah. But you're sending them to the home page of your blog where they could if they wished, read and explore other blogs?

Meredith's Husband: 13:13

They could? Yes. They could say yes. The the sort of general rule, I think would be if you're sending them. If it was a blog page, you want to send them one level up on your website. So if that's a blog, you want to go to the main blog page. If it were I say a if it was one of your service pages, you would want to then send them to the main service page. If it's if it if it weren't like you probably would not remove the about page. But if you were to remove the about page, then you would probably just lead them to the homepage instead.

Meredith: 13:44

Got it? But we need the about page.

Meredith's Husband: 13:47

Yeah, there's not

Meredith: 13:49

an option humans connect with humans.

Meredith's Husband: 13:51

Yeah. Anyway, be careful. Read me big pages pages, do those steps you should you should be fine.

Meredith: 14:00

Should be fine. Yeah, that's what I say. I have to always have the last word. Why don't why is that?

Meredith's Husband: 14:08

If you're finding these episodes helpful, I created something that I think you're going to find even more helpful. It explains the SEO process similar to these episodes in a way that I hope is new for you, but it also puts them in order so that you know what to do first and second and third through the entire SEO process. And I hope saves you a lot of time by giving you an actionable step by step plan. It's called the SEO roadmap, and you can find it at Meritus husband.com/roadmap.