I have seen way too many website owners decide they are going to update their site or switch domains and they forget about the outcomes of doing so.

The longer your site is LIVE on the internet the more engrained into the search engines it becomes. Your pages get picked up and indexed into search engines everywhere.

So when updating your site, rebranding it, changing it in anyway make sure you think about where your pages are and what will happen if those pages disappear.

I’ll tell you what happens…

When a person searching clicks on the page link displayed and that page is no longer on the website, the person searching usually receives a “page not found” message.

Not good.

Recently we helped several clients who had hundreds of pages to their sites transition through their rebranding. We made sure all the pages that were embedded in the search engines pointed to the new pages created.

Now when people search even if they are landing on an old URL link, that link is pointed to the new website where they can find the proper information.

So make sure when you are rebuilding or rebranding your website you take into account all the pages that are driving traffic to your site. Otherwise it’ll be like starting all over with your SEO efforts and your traffic will be dismal until the search engines index those new links.