Dealing with missing pages in google

It's quite often the case that you need to be able to handle the situation where pages are indexed in google, but don't appear on your website.

This might be because your migrating a website across to a new one or where maybe some products on your e-commerce site are no longer valid.

In both of these circumstances you need to be able to re-direct links found in google to somewhere else.

In neatcomponents this pretty straight forward.

Page or Product doesn't exist

e.g. lets say that http://www.onestopcctv.co.uk/product/9CPPLUS is available as a valid link in google, but the page doesn't actually exist in your website. This means that google has indexed the page.

1. Go to your layout manager
2. So, first you need to create a section called 'redirects' in your website and make it a hidden page, but visible to all visitors.
   
   
   
    
3. Then you need to create the direct URL called ../product/9CPPLUS
   
   
    
4. Then you need a redirect to tell google where the link should go. The redirect also has a type 301 and this tells Google that the page has actually moved so eventually the page will be removed from the search index.