I recently pointed out that the Delia Online relaunch was a right cock up. They’ve now made things worse …
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 …
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