Check URL redirects after a site relaunch

- [Announcer] Hey, I'm Brad Batesole and in this Marketing Tip, I want to provide you with a quick method for managing your SCO when you relaunch your website. So let's say that you have an existing website and now, you have a redesign and you're about to roll it out. One of the most important things is to make sure that all of your old URLs redirect to the new URLs if they've changed. The best way to check that this is in fact happening correctly is to crawl your site before you launch and then use the results of that crawl to crawl again and check to see if those existing pages exist or properly redirect after the launch. Now let me show you what I'm talking about. For this to work, you're going to have to have access to a crawl tool and the one that I use and recommend is Screaming Frog. You'll find that at screamingfrog.co.uk. You'll simply select SEO Spider from the menu and choose download. Now they have a free version which has some limited options but you do have to pay to unlock the full access. So first things first, we want to crawl the existing website. I'm going to use a website called explorecalifornia.org. I'll choose start and it's going to run the crawl. Depending on how big your site is, this could take a few seconds or it could take hours. Now because I didn't adjust any settings, it's crawled everything from the images to movie files to JavaScript. So in the upper left hand corner, I'm going to filter HTML and that will give me just the URLs that I'm interested in. From here, you could choose Export and save this as a csv or you can select all the URLs and then Apple + C or Ctrl + C on the PC to copy that. Once I have those copied, I'm going to run this test again. Except in this case, I'm going to choose Mode and select List and then I'll choose Upload and Paste. It's going to paste in everything that I copied and I'll hit OK. And now, what it's going to do is it's going to check all of those links. And you'll see on the right hand side the status. So in this case, if I see 404s, I know that the URL that used to exist, assuming it worked before, no longer exists. If I see a 200, that means everything's okay or if I see a 301, that would indicate that I have a redirect which is fine too. Now additionally, you could also paste this list into say, Excel or Google Sheets if you had say, staging.yourwebsite.com, and that way, you could run this on the staging server before it was put into production. I highly recommend that you take the time to check to make sure that all of the links are working properly when you move from an old site to a new site. Hey, thanks for checking in. As always, I'd love to hear from you. So follow me on Twitter via @bradbatesole or on LinkedIn and let me know what you think about this process.