When it comes to ranking in Google – or Bing/Yahoo for that matter – everyone knows 404’s are the biggest thing you’ll want to avoid. Just about every search engine known to man hates broken links with a steamy hot passion. Honestly though, can you blame them? When you feed them a broken link, they pass it along to their users, which makes them look bad! I personally can’t stand it when I finally find a promising search result to a difficult question, and I’m greeted with nothing more than an unfriendly “404 – Not Found”.
What’s even more frustrating about broken links is, they just seem to happen. Everyone experiences broken links from time to time – especially if you’ve recently hired someone to run a Search Engine Optimization campaign. SEO Experts often change around their clients permalinks to focus on their keywords, but they don’t always take the time to go back and make sure they’ve run proper 301 redirects. It can also happen when you are playing around with WordPress settings. You might be toying with your post settings and next thing you know you’ve added an extra /blog/ in every URL you have on your site. This essentially breaks all your links with Google!
Forgetting to run proper 301 redirects can really rears its ugly head when another site has posted a link to your site, since you often have no idea the link existed in the first place. Even if you do happen to know about a specific backlink, you really have no way of reaching out and telling those website owners to change their links… and frankly, most of them might not care to go back and edit a post — especially if it’s a few years old.
Thankfully, I have found a wonderful plugin that offers an instant, one click solution to the problem. It’s called 404 Redirection. As soon as you activate this little plugin, it automatically redirects all broken links back to your site’s homepage. It’s not intelligent enough to locate where the content that previously existed on the broken link has moved, but it’s better than the alternative!
Not only will it keep you friendly in the eyes of Google and company, but it also gives you a chance to redirect all incoming traffic that was previously getting pointed towards some blog content to your home page. Typically your homepage is where you can find all the information about your site, your opt-in, and an overview of all your offers. Heck! It might even work out better than before!
Installing 404 Redirection is easy as pie. Simply navigate to the Plugins section of your WordPress Dashboard and select Add New. Search for 404 Redirection and it’ll be the first on the list. Simply select Install Plugin and let WordPress do its thing! Select Activate Plugin once WordPress has finished its job, and you are set! 404 Redirection has no settings to be configured, it runs as intended out of the box!
Just like that, you’ve solved one of the oldest SEO problems known to the internet once and for all with the click of a button!
