Module 4: Links and Redirects

Most of the traffic a site loses during a migration never shows up in analytics as a dramatic crash. It leaks away quietly, one bad redirect at a time. A page moves, a rule points to the wrong place, a chain of hops adds up, and the ranking that took months to earn transfers to nothing. This module is about closing those leaks before they cost you.

Redirects are where rankings get lost. The wrong status code tells Google the move is temporary when it is permanent, or hands a POST request to a GET handler, or leaves a page in the index that should have been retired. Getting the code right is not a technical detail. It is the difference between a clean transfer of signals and a slow, silent bleed.

Broken-link cleanup is the highest-ROI audit you can run on an existing site. A 404 with thirty internal links pointing at it is a doorway your own pages keep pushing visitors and crawlers through. Finding those dead ends, fixing the source pages, and deciding between update, redirect, and remove takes a crawl and an afternoon. Most sites have a dozen of these and no one is watching.

By the end of this module you will know which of the four redirect codes to use and when, how to collapse a redirect chain, how to tell a soft 404 from a hard one, and how to turn a crawl export into an ordered fix list. Then you will prove it in the quiz.