updating links to my site?

[weslinda]

We are doing a major re-organization on a large site I manage. Of course we're implementing redirects and so forth within the site.

My question is about those linking to our site. Right now we have something like 1500 ++ IBL's to various pages within the site. Should we be concerned that we need to go and notify those web sites of the new URL structure? Or simply allow them to be redirected through the onserver redirects?

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on the best way to handle this.

[weslinda]

Now, as an add on question, in the past, we had three domain names pointing to the same site / content. We've setup redirects so that only one domain is needed to access the site.

Should we put together a team to go out and update all of the pages linking to the two domain names we are not using, or again let the redirects handle the changes?

[wige]

301 redirects will transfer at least some of the link juice - however, it is unknown if all the pagerank is transferred through a redirect. My advice would be to implement a slow transition of the links. The ones you can control, send an e-mail to those webmasters letting them know about the new URL. This will help the spiders find that new page more quickly and ensure you get the full benefit of the IBLs. Of course, bear in mind that the search engines expect external links to change slowly over time as the linking sites are updated, so changing all the links at once would probably do more harm than good.

[weslinda]

This confirms my thoughts and thoughts I've received from others. I'll focus on the internal changes and slowly work the externals. This is such a fun, fun, thing.

[gwhite]

I think it is asking for trouble to ask websites to change their links to you, they may decide they shouldn't be linking to you at all. I can only see negative here (loss of links).

[weslinda]

The site in question is a major medical authority site. I doubt we'd see a major loss of links to our site. Certainly could be true for other web sites, but this is not an issue I'd forsee happening to us.

Most in this community would more likely be pleased that we provided them with the updated information.

[Orion]

If your IBLs all point to pages that no longer exist or are 301'd then over time I think it would be beneficial to have all those IBLs point to the new pages...

It would be awesome if someone could come up with some kind of widget (link an include) that people could insert in their site to link to your site that might refer to a legend or something so when and if you update those pages or move the information you could simply update a page on your site and the IBLs would remain pointing to the correct information... Maybe some day!

[weslinda]

In a perfect world Orion that widget would exist. But that would require all sites to agree on something and we know that will never happen.

We are doing 301's so that everyone learns where the new pages are. I presume over time we'll work to contact others so that eventually all URL's point to the same place.

I think we'll have to bite the bullet and start contacting people and slowly (for google's sake) get these changed.

[Webnauts]

This confirms my thoughts and thoughts I've received from others. I'll focus on the internal changes and slowly work the externals.

Do you have any further questions brother?

[weslinda]

yeah...anyone giving away copies of halo 3?