Your computer sucks. The Core Duo is dead -- now you need a Core 2 Duo! Well, at least nobody is selling them. And if the web page was located at /Core-Duo.html, one can 301 redirect /Core-Duo.html to /Core-2-Duo.html. This channels the legacy equity to related updated content. This practice is superior to returning a URL not found (404) error, both because it transfers equity contained by that URL instead of dispensing with it, as well as refers any old links to relevant updated content.
It is clear to me that an old page that is semantically related to a new one will effect the transference of link equity. Furthermore, it is not only advantageous with regard to rankings -- it is helpful to users and search engines. Often, someone looking for an obsolete model of a product will be pleased if he sees the current model. And perhaps sometimes not -- but if the legacy URLs are not monetized, I am much less interested in pleasing that person.
There is nothing sneaky about this practice -- yet I see almost nobody implementing it. 404'ing URLs is tantamount to throwing money in the garbage in the worst case. So while you're buying text links and you feel the flame burning through your wallet, consider this concept of of link equity preservation:
Preserving equity that would otherwise be lost is equivalent to buying it -- and perhaps much better. I suppose for large sites, redirecting old products to new products on an individual basis may be unwieldy -- but in that case one can just redirect to some sort of related product listing pages -- in this case "Intel CPUs."
And no matter how obvious this seems, I can count the web sites that do this in a disciplined way on my fingers. I like equity -- do you?
January 11th, 2007 at 1:09 am
Yes I do like equity. First we make a list of pages that have some Page Rank. We also look at the logs to see which ones are getting traffic. If they are getting a lot of traffic we don’t even do a redirect we just change the content to something similar. A custom 404 page can look like a regular page and have suggested pages for the pages that can’t be changed to something similar. We have spent a great deal of time on this and find it is worth the effort.
January 11th, 2007 at 11:00 am
[...] URLs for removed content should always return a 404 Since the content isn’t there anymore the URLs should obviously return a 404 header. It will make the search engines understand that you no longer provide anything relevant about the subject. Redirecting the URL with a 301 to somewhat related content is shady and isn’t good for usability. [...]
January 11th, 2007 at 1:01 pm
[...] SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich » Cashing In With Legacy Link Equity Your computer sucks. The Core Duo is dead – now you need a Core 2 Duo! Well, at least nobody is selling them. And if the web page was located at /Core-Duo.html, one can 301 redirect /Core-Duo.html to /Core-2-Duo.html. This channels the legacy equity to related updated content. This practice is superior to returning a URL not found (404) error, both because it transfers equity contained by that URL instead of dispensing with it, as well as refers any old links to relevant updated content. [...]
February 10th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
True. It's like having "www.domain.com" working and "domain.com" failing (another good use of 301 redirects before Google allowed you to declare one or the other authoritative for your domain through sitemaps).
But equity transfer being so useful, some spamdexers abuse 301 redirects, so the Search Engines may treat them differently than one might expect eventually. So too much changing content at formerly unchanged high equity pages may be noted unfavorably at the Googleplex.
For example, create a subdomain at a PR/hilltop/trustRank-appreciated domain, get it indexed, and then 301 redirect to a new domain to attempt to take the new domain out of the sandbox is one black hat trick.