The problem - the third result

ABCe: not found

The solution

The usual thing to do with known links that no longer work is to 301 redirect them to a different page (EG when you know a URL has moved). For all other URLs that don't work (EG when someone mistypes one), you return a 404 code.

These status codes help Google, for instance, work out what is going on. If it sees a 404 code it knows there's nothing there so it needn't return the page in search results.

I've written before about the awful abce site and the terrible abce redesign. It appears when they did the latest redesign, they decided to 301 redirect any broken links to this page: http://www.abce.co.uk/404.aspx.

However, that page, even though it it called 404.aspx and has a 'page not found' title, returns a 200 code - telling Google that it is a genuine URL.

The end result is that all links to old ABCe URLs are redirected to the new 404.aspx page. The 301 tells Google to count links to the old pages as if they belonged to the new 404.aspx page. Because this is a lot of links and a lot of pages, Google has ended up thinking the 404.aspx is the most important page on the abce site.

All of which means that if you type abce into google, you get the identical abc site first, and then you get the 404 page (with a 200 code) for the abce site. Obviously, this looks completely stupid.

Any relaunch or redesign can cost you traffic from Google as it tries to work out what's gone on. But as I explained here and here, Delia Smith's relaunch involved no-nos such as deleting all the old forum posts (dumping 000s of indexed pages) and failing to do any redirects from old URLs to new one (sacrificing all the benefits of inbound links to the old pages - so instead of appearing first for a search on Eton Mess, for instance, Delia is now nowhere).

Here is the proof of what this has cost her - the relaunch was in the last week of June, so watch for changes in the graphs at that point.

Delia's traffic halves

This first graph shows the %age of all pageviews that were from deliaonline.com. You can just about see them trail off in the last month.

And this second one is a bit clearer, it shows reach - the %age of all internet users who visited delia's site. As you can see, it's gone from an average of just under .004% until the relaunch at the end of June when it plummets to just under .002%.

Is site usage up?

You might be able to glean some good news from the stats - but you can't, trust me.

This looks promising. Pageviews per user initially went up after the relaunch (but then fell again).

Even better, the bounce rate - the %age of users who only look at one page - is down (but this fall seems to predate the relaunch...)

However, this is all a bit illusory, as time on the site is down. People are clearly having a quick look round - maybe looking for the deleted pages - and then leaving (more quickly than they used to).

If you have a redesign, make sure you learn the lessons from this one ...

deliasmith.com has vanished - so links from external sites are broken and give no SEO benefit.

One of my criticisms was they had left the old site up at deliasmith.com (with no real warning that it was defunct) as well as the new one at deliaonline.com (in some good news, they've finally redirected the non-www version to the www one).

What they've done

They've now turned off deliasmith.com ... and haven't put any redirects in place to the new site. What does this mean?

• Google results useless Any results that appear in Google for deliasmith.com don't go anywhere - you just get "The server at www.deliasmith.com is taking too long to respond".
• Links broken Any links to deliasmith.com no longer work - you get the same message.
• SEO benefit thrown away. And they've thrown away the SEO benefit of the 330 links that Yahoo site explorer reports to deliasmith.com, such as the one pictured above from Maldon Salt.

What they should have done

The correct thing to do is identify which deliasmith.com pages have inbound links and redirect them to relevant new pages on deliaonline.com. Then redirect every other old page to the new site's homepage.

If you can't be bothered to do that, just redirect every deliasmith.com page to the new deliaonline.com homepage.

But don't just switch off your old domain ...

Maybe she's been taking lessons from the ABCe relaunch? Anyway, here are some of her biggest issues ...

They've deleted all the old forums and lots of people's saved recipes

This is utter host-moving, site-relaunching madness.

The old forums: deleted

Delia deletes the old forums

They're not migrating the old forum posts prior to the relaunch to the new site - that's 10s of thousands of postings from the old version of the site.

I really can't conceive of what would make someone do this when they relaunched a site.

Maybe it's related to the fact that when the site relaunched, people were forced to choose a new password.

New passwords? Sounds fishy ..

According to this page: "when the new site is launched, you will have to supply a new password as, for data protection reasons, we can't transfer your existing passwords over."

Smells fishier than fish-pie recipe to me. What has data protection got to do with this? More likely, they didn't want to spend the time / money to port over the database of old posts and passwords. So they're just going to delete everyone's postings.

Someone who doesn't realise the old site hasn't actually been turned off yet, has pointed out that it's all OK as you can still access the old forums ... via the google cache. Oh. My. God. They do know the cache will eventually disappear. And is that really the way to handle a site migration!??

Saved recipes: deleted

If only you'd known ...

The (old and new) site lets you save recipes in your own personal online recipe book - so you can build up a nice collection of ones you like.

However, confusion over passwords has led to some people reregistering.

As a result, they've lost their profiles and recipes.

They didn't actually have to do this, but it wasn't clear - an email was supposed to go out, but not everyone got it.

Missing saved recipes: devastated

As a result, people have reregistered - losing their old profiles. So some people have lost their entire history of saved recipes - one described herself as 'devastated' as a result. The rest are just really annoyed.

Again, this could all have been annoyed if they hadn't just wiped the slate clean with the relaunch.

Oh look, they're selling links

This page is a sponsored 'advertisement promotion'.

I'm going to gloss over the fact that the breadcrumb trail says this: "peppadew^TM: naturally south african" (yes, with the TM) but they don't use the TM in the copy.

However, they are giving a dofollow link to peppadew.com to someone who has paid to advertise on their site.

Paid links are in violation of Google's guidelines. These aren't law, obviously. But they are if you don't want to get booted out of Google's index ...

Also, if you're going to have a link to a money off voucher on this page, maybe don't point the link to http:/// as this won't really work ...

OMG - there are adverts in the breadcrumb trail

The only breadcrumb trail ever to link to adverts rather than to pages on your own site

Have you come across Vibrant? They do those annoying double underline adverts where when you mouseover, a big box appears selling something. They call it 'in-text advertising'. I call it really annoying.

Anyway, Delia has used it in the breadcrumb trail.

Yes, in a world's first, they've turned keywords in the breadcrumb trail into clickable adverts. Words almost fail me. I know I said I couldn't conceive of something earlier. But really. Linking words in your breadcrumb trail to an advert ...

(You may have noticed the word honey double underlines in that earlier screenshot - yes, they're linking people's  usernames to adverts as well!)

Oh look, there's the old site at the same time!

The old site was at www.deliasmith.com. The new site is at www.deliaonline.com.

For some reason, they've left the old site there while running the new one. That should really confuse everyone - google certainly seems confused as it's currently returning both. Let's hope it doesn't think the new site is duplicate content and remove it from the index...

There is a tiny message on the old home page that says "The launch has been delayed by a few days: look out for the new site any day now!" Except it is launched ...

None of the other pages on the old version have this message, so you can happily browse the old site without realising the new one is there... Still, at least it means you can access the old forum posts for now.

Sort out the www and non-www versions

Adding to this, it's yet another site that doesn't realise that deliaonline.com is NOT THE SAME as www.deliaonline.com.

Surely they should do better than serve up 'Bad Request (Invalid Hostname) when you visit the former? Try a redirect, people.

Sloppy title writing

Can I suggest a simple rule for the title - the bit of meta data that Google uses to show in the results.

It's usually best to go: 'Page name - Section name - Site name', or some similar rule. On your home page, try something like: 'Site name - short summary of proposition'.

Here's what not to do: 'Something random and different each time'.

And it's rarely a good idea to go 'Site name - page name' (as it makes it hard to scan results in Google as they all start the same, plus Google treats the keywords at the front of the title as more important).

However, the relaunched site has titles like this:

• Delia Online - Ingredients (even though the section is actually called ingredients with a lower case i)
• Delia Online - community (I do so love random capitalisation)
• Delia Online - how-to-cook (this is my personal favourite - random hyphenation. I mean, do people check this stuff when they relaunch sites? No? Just me then.)

I suppose they're consistently inconsistent, which is good. We have both Recipes and equipment (so there's more than one one upper case and more than one lower case example), and also news-and-features, too - maybe the rule is that all multi-word sections are hyphenated and lower case. Maybe they just didn't think about it? Who knows.

The ones in the forums are good, too - every single one has the title of 'Delia Online -'. That'll look great in Google.

The first link in the massive header is pointing to the wrong place

The header to Delia Online. Massive.

The header is massive - about 450 pixels deep. What on earth is all that white space for?

Seasonal food? Or the wrong page?

Also the list of links for June (which are part of the header - yes you see that massive white hole on EVERY PAGE) are a bit odd.

The top one is to 'Seasonal recipes to cook this month'. This takes you to a gallery page with examples such as 'beat the credit crunch' and 'Chocolate to make you melt'.

Are these seasonal?

I'm presuming they meant to point to the 'What should you be cooking this month' page.

More testing required ...

It doesn't seem that much better to me ... a bit like they've tried to bodge the BBC home page into their ghastly colour scheme. And I'm not sure they've thought it through - they're truncating intros in the featured story box like this: "A COUNCIL which was criticised after banning home ba ...". ba what?!?

The new look express

I lack the time and energy to go into it right now. But it's pretty awful when you look at the detail. There is so much copy sliced off by the right of the boxes for a start. They can't think this is good can they?

Also, someone better explain about accessibility to them soon. This is how it looks with javascript turned off - there's nothing there!

Javascript off: nothing there!

If at any point the ABC wants to pay me a consultancy fee, for all this free advice, just leave me a comment to tell me how to receive my money ...

All the URLs have changed but there are no redirects

Search results for ABCe after redesign

They've had a redesign, but they haven't redirected the old URLs to new ones. So, for instance, if you click the second link shown in Google for a search on ABCe, you get page not found.

Lesson When relaunching a website, always 301 redirect your old pages to new ones (even if they're all just to your new home page). That way, external links still work and you keep the SEO benefit of any links.

They haven't sorted www vs non www

The more observant will have noticed that the title of the first result in that screenshot says 'To access IIS Help'. The ABC hasn't realised that abce.org.uk is not the same URL as www.abce.org.uk. And if you go to the ABC URLs without www, you get page not found or server errors.

Compare these pages:

• www.abc.org.uk
• abc.org.uk

and these ones:

• www.abce.org.uk
• abce.org.uk

Lesson When you set up your website, redirect yourdomain.co.uk/whatever to www.yourdomain.co.uk/whatever. And log in to your google webmaster account to set your preferred domain (www or non-www).

They're running two absolutely identical websites

The new ABC homepage. And also the new ABCe homepage.

You can access the entire website at www.abc.org.uk - or you can see an identical website at www.abce.org.uk.

The only difference for each and every page across the two sites is whether there is an e in the domain name or not. For instance, compare these two URLs:

• www.abc.org.uk/Corporate/AboutABCe/StandardsandMetrics.aspx
• www.abce.org.uk/Corporate/AboutABCe/StandardsandMetrics.aspx

The same is true for every URL. This will cause problems with duplicate content in search engines, plus splitting incoming links over two URLs is problematic for SEO.

They do have two brands - ABC for print, ABCe for online - but they don't need two websites. And even if they did, they wouldn't need two identical ones.

Lesson Have a website. Don't have another identical one.

The navigation is inconsistent

If you go, say, here, some related links appear in the right:

• If you click on the first one, JICwebs, then a jargon buster sudenly appears in the left hand menu, under the links that are for subscribers only.
• If you click on the second one - the jargon buster - you get page not found.
• If you click the others, some random stuff happens.

As far as I can work out, the top navigation bar controls the right hand related links box which in turn controls the left-hand menu.

Some pages have a right hand menu with related links, some are full-width with no right hand menu, and some have an empty right hand menu.

Lesson Make your navigation consistent. And keep things that are together, together. Having the top, left and right navigations interdependant AND inconsistent is really confusing. And use templates consistently.

Some minor points

• Login not clear To get to most pages, you need to login. It's not clear which pages require this. Although on this page it says "only members can access the following pages" and you can click on the links, so clearly they're confused at ABCe too ...
• Titles unclear Although the titles have improved since the last site, they still aren't ideal. For a start, capitalisation is random. And secondly, they don't show the site structure. Instead of going 'Page name - Section - ABCe', they just show the page name. This looks unclear in Google.
• Descriptions poor The descriptions aren't proper English. This isn't gramatically correct: "How to become a subscriber to ABCe and what are the benefits of doing so."
• Too many link styles Some links are blue italic. Some are black unerlined. Some are red not underlined. Some are grey. Make your mind up ...
• Mising images There's a contact list here, but all the photos are missing.

I could go on - there's more. But I won't.

Yet despite these basic problems, they're using SIFR to show fancy fonts. I think they should concentrate on these other things ...