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>There's zero reason to change your URLs every time you change CMS, and there's even less of a reason not to redirect the old URL format to the new one. Are yo
by Dalewyn 4y ago
>There's zero reason to change your URLs every time you change CMS, and there's even less of a reason not to redirect the old URL format to the new one.
Are you willing to pay them for that work?
No?
There's your reason.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- notpushkin 4y agoNo, but I am willing to stop visiting them and/or linking to them.
- sundarurfriend 4y agoYeah. When a site says "the old xyz.oursite.com pages no longer exist. use the search bar to blah blah", there's 90% chance that I'm just going to close the tab and just try a different (even if non-official) site.
- Dalewyn 4y agoThanks for proving my point: There's no value in pursuing people who aren't your customers, who aren't providing you value. If we as end-users want URLs to not rot away, we need to put value on working URLs that convinces webmasters to put in the effort to maintain working URLs.
- notpushkin 4y agoI mean, if visitors don't convert to value for you, why even bother making a site?
- Symbiote 4y agoExisting links to your site should be fairly valuable. Search engines know what links there, users following links from other pages think your site is more useful than the current page.
- snowwrestler 4y agoLast time we redesigned a major site, we carefully analyzed every URL for organic traffic value. Most were worthless: barely indexed by Google and receiving at most a couple visits a month. We killed most of them and saw improvements in overall traffic from search. I think a lot of folks originally thought of websites like reference books. And some should still be thought of that way (Wikipedia, open source documentation, etc). I used to try very hard to keep all URLs functional during site redesigns. We accumulated thousands and thousands of redirects… most of which were never used. I’ve since come to consider that a lot of sites are more like magazines: useful for a limited time span but not something that needs to live on your shelf forever.
- phendrenad2 4y agoWeird question. I'm equally willing to pay for working links as I am to pay for the content, so the variable becomes irrelevant. A broken link is no different from broken content.
- unholythree 4y agoIf it’s a business, it certainly makes me less interested in using their product or service. Honeywell’s site has this problem and now I associate their brand with annoyance at trying to navigate dead links to technical documentation. I end up thinking stuff like: “I wish this was a Siemens part” which I can’t imagine is their goal.