Changing URLs for a page? You’ll want to preserve link juice! Here’s how to find all the internal URLs from your site that link to the old/existing URL, so that you can quickly edit them to the new URL using Google Webmaster Tools (GWT).
Sure, you may have a 301 in place to forward the old URL to new URL, but there are still good reasons you would want to do this: 1. You loose a small amount of link juice / link equity though the 301 and 2. To conserve server resources; as every time a visitor clicks on a link that get’s redirected, you need to serve up 2 pages instead of one. Multiply that by millions of clicks a day or week on hundreds of links sitewide, it’s easy to see why a practice of going thought your site and finding and editing links to point to your new URL makes sense.
For the finding part, which sometimes can be half the battle, here’s a video I did back in September ‘08 that shows the process – click on the image below and then click on the video to view:
The GWT interface has been updated in early 2009, but you get the idea. This could save you tons of time to find and change out all those legacy links, clean up your archetecture, and squeeze as much link juice out of those internal links as possilbe.
(P.S. You do need to have your site ‘verified’ on GWT first however – which I do recommend as it gives you a lot of SEO visibility; diagnostics, statistics, tools, etc. to help you to know ‘your site according to Google’ and how to best direct your SEO efforts. Enjoy!)
Lawrence Touitou brings you the best SEO tools, tips and advice on his SEO blog: SEOWithoutBorders.org - a collection of some of the best, SEO best practices from the most prominent SEOs in the industry.