Over the years of running a website, it's not uncommon to have restructured the folders, moved files around, or even renamed files and folders. When you do you will break inbound links from other websites who had linked to those URLs.

That in turn causes you to lose page rank.

That's what has happened to me while running Interment.net. Over the 13+ years of publishing that site, it has grown huge. And in order to manage it in a sane and sensible way, I've had to redesign the directory structure and filenaming conventions, and of course, broke many inbound links and lost incoming PR value.

Knowing that there are still hundreds of other websites still linking to these old URLs that now no longer exist, I decided to see if I could recapture that PR value by simply recreating those old URLs.

So I used Google Webmaster Tools to take a look at the "Crawl Error" report, showing me all the other websites that are linking to a non-existent URL on my site.

• I found that some webmasters made typing errors when creating a link to my website. This isn't anything I can fix other than contacting them to make the correction. (Which of course is a worthy effort to capture some extra PR value).


• But I found that the majority of crawl errors were due to what I've described above, where I broke inbound links by changing my old directory structure and filenames.

Below is a screenshot of Google Webmaster Tools Crawl Error report for just one of my old URLs (http://www.interment.net/aus/nsw/orano/mudgee.htm)...


There are eight inbound links above, and these links are still live on the Internet, and still have PR value to give me, except they are pointing to a URL that no longer exists (/aus/nsw/orano/mudgee.htm)

So all I did was recreate that URL on my site by creating the "orano" folder and the "mudgee.htm" file. It's not important that "mudgee.htm" contain the same old content that it used to have, all that's needed is for this page to exist and have some links that carry the incoming PR value to the rest of the site.

Now there are perhaps a hundred more of these URLs that I used to have that I no longer have. So, I would need to recreate all of these again.

The problem with doing that is that I will clutter up the nice-and-neat directory structure and filenaming convention that I use today. But I can solve that problem by hiding every new folder and file that I recreate for this effort.

But then again, I can only do that because this particular website of mine is hosted on a dedicated server that I can access via remote session and set the properties of each folder and filename to "hidden". If your website is on a shared server, you may or may not be able to do that depending on your web host provider.


I created the folder "orano" and set its attribute to "Hidden" so that it no longer appears in my FTP sessions.

This may be a little more work, and a little more technical, but here's a way to capture a good deal more PR value that you may have lost over the years.  ✓