I audited my own website and found 161 broken pages.

01What I found

I rebuilt my own site a few years ago and did what almost everybody does, which is think about the new pages and not the old ones. The new site went up, it looked better, and I moved on to paying work.

When I finally sat down and looked properly, Google Search Console was reporting 161 addresses that people were still arriving at, and every single one of them was showing a not found page. Some of them had been getting real traffic for years.

One page had been sitting at position 2.4 for a search term I would very much like to rank for. Another had gathered 2,631 impressions in three months, which means 2,631 times somebody was shown my business in a list of results, and every one of those people who clicked landed on an error.

02Why this happens to almost everyone

When you rebuild a site, the addresses usually change. A page that used to live at /services/web-design becomes /websites, or a blog post moves from /2021/06/title to /blog/title. That is fine and often an improvement.

The problem is that the old address does not stop existing. Google still has it indexed. Other websites still link to it. People have it bookmarked. Your own old business cards may have it printed on them. Unless somebody tells the server "that has moved, send them here instead", every one of those arrivals hits a wall.

Nobody warns you about this because the people who rebuild sites are usually thinking about design, and the tool that would tell you is a free Google product that most small businesses have never opened.

03How to find out whether you have the same problem

You need Google Search Console. It is free, it is Google’s own tool, and if you have never set it up, that in itself tells you something about who has been looking after your site.

Once you are in, go to the Pages report. Google lists every address it has tried to reach and what happened. The one you care about is "Not found (404)". If that number is more than a handful, you have lost traffic you paid for once already.

Then cross reference it with the Performance report. Sort by impressions. Any address that is getting impressions and returning a 404 is actively costing you enquiries right now, today, while you read this.

04The fix, which is less work than you think

You write a redirect. A redirect is a one line instruction that says "anybody asking for this old address should be sent to this new one". Search engines treat a permanent redirect, called a 301, as a forwarding address, and most of the ranking the old page had earned transfers across.

The work is not technical. The work is deciding, for each dead address, which living page is the closest match. That is a judgement call and it is the bit that actually matters.

My rule is that a redirect should send somebody somewhere they would have been happy to find. If an old page was about window cleaning in Crawley and you no longer do window cleaning, do not send them to your homepage and hope. That is worse than a 404, because a person who wanted one specific thing now has to work out where they are.

05The pages I deliberately left broken

Two of mine I left as 404s on purpose, and this is the part most guides skip.

My site had picked up sixteen thousand impressions for two product pages that had nothing to do with my business. They were left over from an old shop experiment. That traffic was never going to buy anything from me, and redirecting it somewhere real would have sent thousands of confused people to a page about web design.

A 404 is the honest answer when the thing genuinely does not exist any more. It is only a failure when a real equivalent was available and nobody bothered to point at it.

06What it is worth

In my case, the page at position 2.4 and the one with 2,631 impressions were the two I cared about most, and both are recoverable because the content that earned those rankings still exists. It has moved, not vanished.

If you have had your site rebuilt in the last five years and nobody mentioned redirects to you, it is worth an hour of somebody’s time to check. Either you find nothing, which is a relief, or you find traffic you have already paid to earn sitting behind a wall.