Angry in the Great White North

The URL for the page in question is http://www.liberalalberta.ca/teammartin.aspx. When you visit the page, instead of seeing a page about Paul Martin, you "Stephane Dion at a Glance".

When a friend pointed this out to me via email, I was on the road and unable to check the page. But I pulled over and quickly typed back a response of what I thought was happening. You see, you never delete a page. Or more accurately, you don't eliminate a URL. This is because as a page ages, it accrues links and page rank as Google and other search engines index the page. That has value. Also, the search engines will continue to serve the page up during searches. If you delete it, you'll get the dreaded "404 Page does not exist" error, as well as breaking all the backlinks people might have created from other websites, and that always reflects poorly on a website.

But then you still don't want this page. What do you do?

The right thing to do is create a new page (Team Dion, for example, at http://www.liberalalberta.ca/teamdion.aspx). Then you alter those links you have control over to link to the new page with the correct anchor text. So on Liberal Party (Alberta) web pages linking to Team Martin, change the words to read Team Dion and alter the URL appropriately. But you still have that Team Martin page. Next, you instruct your server (the exact means depends on the server software -- Apache, Microsoft IIS, and so forth) to deliver a "301 redirect" to any request for the Team Martin page, with the redirect pointing to the Team Dion page. That will cause the Team Dion page to be served up instead. The 301 redirect (as opposed to other kinds -- 302, 303, and such) tells a search engine that this redirect is "permanent", which has an additional effect on search engines. Google and the other search engines update their databases such that if a search request was to cause them in the past to offer up the Team Martin page, the URL for the Team Dion page is offered up instead. The search engines also transfer over whatever ranking factors were attached to the old page to the new page. Notice if you just created a new page without a redirect, the new page would rank very low, even though it is meant to replace a page with higher rank.

For a lot of people reading this, this is old hat.

But here's the weird thing. After all this, I expected to find that the webmaster of the Liberal Party in Alberta had done what I just described. As best as I can tell, he didn't.

Instead, when I check for the redirect, there isn't any:

Results for: http://www.liberalalberta.ca/teammartin.aspx

Status : (200) OK
Either http://www.liberalalberta.ca/teammartin.aspx is NOT REDIRECTING to any URL or the redirect is NOT SEARCH ENGINE FRIENDLY.

That means they kept the Team Martin page and just rewrote it for Stephane Dion. If they had created a http://www.liberalalberta.ca/teamdion.aspx, then the redirect would avoid the silliness of Stephane Dion popping up on a page with a URL refering to Paul Martin.

Why wouldn't they do a redirect? There is no good reason, really. Maybe the webmaster didn't know how. Or maybe he was worried about doing it wrong and breaking potentially thousands of backlinks.

Except that there are only 11 backlinks, and they all come from within the Liberal Party (Alberta) website. Check for yourself.

In fact, they all occur in the menu, which is probably autogenerated or otherwise shared from a common file. Probably one change, or at most eleven, and there would be no backlinks to the old Team Martin page at all. The only way to reach it would have been through the search engines, and the 301 redirect would have fixed that in the way I described.

I don't think we should take this as a sign that the Liberals of Alberta are pining for Paul Martin. This is just web maintenance, but admittedly done in an odd way. It gives me an excuse to blog a bit about page redirects and search engine ranks and general website maintenance.