Forum

Storesonline Engineering and Technology Blog

Title

New Broken Link / Redirect Feature

Author

Resource Administrator

Created

Monday, Dec. 11, 2006

Broken Link

Under the Stats menu, Broken Links submenu, you can see what requests have been made to your site that could not be fulfilled. This means someone got a "Page Not Found" or 404 error. This is useful in letting you know if someone has linked to your site and the link is no longer valid. The referrer is also listed so you know the source of the link (search engine, affiliate site, etc.). After you have resolved a link problem, you may delete the record of that bad link on that page. Broken Link information is automatically removed after 30 days of the event.

Note: Requests for /robots.txt and /favicon.ico are ignored, as they are frequently requested, but are not errors. We want to reduce the "noise" of the Broken Links information.

Page Redirects

Under the Page menu, Redirects submenu, you can set up a list of redirects for your site. These redirects are used in the case where a "Page Not Found" would have been generated, but you want to tell the visitor's web browser that "it's not here, but go to this page instead". This is helpful if you had a product or page indexed by a search engine like Google, but that product or page no longer exists. Instead of giving your visitor the message "Page Not Found", you can redirect them to an appropriate or related page. If you renamed a product SKU, you may find that some people are clicking links on search engines to view your original SKU. Setting up a Page Redirect will allow you to map your old SKU to the new SKU and your customers still get to the same information, avoiding the "Page Not Found" situation.