Table of Contents
- What Is a Redirect Concierge?
- How Does It Work?
- Live Demo
- Pricing
- White Label Option
- Referral Program
- Let’s Chat 📞
What Is a Redirect Concierge?
Broken pages have been afflicting users since the internet’s inception in 1993.
We have set out to rid the internet of them, one site at a time. Using natural language processing (NLP) and automation, our 404 No More service identifies broken pages (i.e., pages that return a 4xx or 5xx status code) and suggests redirects using a series of rules that follow a cascading logic.
Although automation is built in to this service, it’s not a fully automated service. Each site needs its own set of rules for the suggestion engine to work intelligently, and we need to create custom dictionaries for keywords that wouldn’t be in the NLP standard dictionaries for it to work well. However, there are tiers that enable clients to get as sophisticated as they want with these rules—or have us help generate them.
How Does It Work?
I broke down the process for each of the tiers in a Miro board, but I hit on the primary components at a high level below.
1. We Crawl Your Site
Or you crawl it and send us the csv if it’s behind a registration or pay wall.
2. You Provide Your Fallback Page
If no suitable page is found for your broken page, what do you want visitors to land on in lieu of an underwhelming 404 page? The default I used in the demo I ran with Toms was a search results page (SERP) that took the main keywords from the broken page. Simply put, if your site, mysite.com has a page for blue widgets, mysite.com/blue-widgets.html, that is broken and the search query your site uses is ‘q’ and your site uses ‘+’ to concatenate search terms, it might suggest the page mysite.com/search?q=blue+widgets.
3. You Provide the Redirect Rules (Expert Tier)
We will send you a spreadsheet that you’ll fill in, and we will use those rules to generate redirects for URLs that have no suitable match. You will be able to either use exact match, contains, or regex. (We’ll explain more in the kickoff.)
4. We Run the Algorithm
Our proprietary suggestion engine uses NLP intelligence in combination with automation and a custom weighting mechanism to find the best redirect for each broken page (i.e., each page that returns a 4xx or 5xx status code 🤓). If it finds an appropriate page to redirect the broken page to, it adds it as a recommendation. To demo the service, I ran a crawl of toms.com. Why Toms? I love their site and their mission. (And, if you know anything about me, I love shoes!) Below are just some example redirect recommendations from that crawl.
If the tool doesn’t find suitable pages to redirect a broken page to, it either uses redirect rules (available at every tier except the DIY tier) or a default fallback. Just to illustrate how these redirect rules could work, I created one for the Toms site. To start, I noticed that there were a lot of pages that ended with /undefined. All of these pages were broken. So I created a rule that any url that ended with /undefined should redirect to the homepage for that region.
These rules can get as granular as you want. For example, if Toms had a list of all the brands they sell and dedicated landing pages for each brand (or a search results page for that brand), I could create rules that mapped each brand page with their corresponding landing page for that brand within the region the 404 page was in. Or any broken page that contains the word sunglasses and doesn’t meet the match threshold should redirect to the sunglasses landing page for that region (example sunglasses page for the US). Or, if a publisher used the service, they may want to redirect broken pages to the category page its closest to so /news/us/hot-story-about-pandas-that-escaped-from-the-zoo might redirect to /news/us/.
5. We Create a Dashboard(s)
All Tiers: Redirection Dashboard
Anyone who’s had to dig through a csv of crawl data knows how difficult it is to find actionable insights in that digital jungle.
To make it easier to find these insights, we provide a dashboard for clients to access on their own time, as well as go through with us. It’s fully interactive. A few key features:
- Hover over a directory or page (aka node) to get more information, e.g., the full url, the number of urls in that node, and the percentage of broken urls.
- Click on it to drill down into a node and filter the table below.
- View the keywords used to find a suitable redirect (as its stem so that keywords like run and running or shoe and shoes aren’t treated separately).
- Filter the table using the keyword filter at the top-right corner.
- Sort the table by any column.
- Navigate back up the hierarchy using the breadcrumbs.
See it in action in the demo video below.
Or check out these annotated snapshots.
Consulting Tiers: Redirection + Strategy Dashboard
The Consulting tier was originally going to be the only offering, but I created two additional tiers for those on a tighter budget. But for those who hire us to help them build their redirect strategy, we will deliver an additional, highly customized dashboard with page-level data you provide. For this analysis, you can provide up to five additional metrics for us to use in crafting a redirect strategy, allowing us to pay closer attention to directories and/or pages that are high performers. You can select from any combination of KPIs that are important to you. Here are a few that are top of mind, but you may have others:
- impressions
- clicks
- CTR
- visits
- revenue
- conversion
- time on page
- engagement time
- goal conversion(s)
- social shares
- customer lifetime value
- cost per acquisition
- engagement rate
- inbound links
- internal links
And no need for you to marry up these metrics. You can just toss your data over the fence however is most convenient for you, and we’ll blend the data for you and store it in a PostgreSQL database you’ll have access to with your dashboards. And with that data we’ll create and review with you a dashboard that gives you much deeper insight into your broken pages to help you identify and audit high-priority fixes.
See it in action in the demo video below.
Or check out these annotated snapshots.
6. We Configure Your Customized Redirect Rules
The missing piece of most crawl reports is how to actually resolve the broken pages. Guess what engineers typically don’t want? If you guessed a csv of all the broken pages for the site and an email to please fix them by EOB Thursday, you’re right! The challenge is each framework has specific requirements for structuring and formatting redirect rules on its server. Below are examples wildly illustrating how these differently these rules are structured in different frameworks. But we’ll write a custom script for your server to align these redirect rules with your existing rules.
We’ll ask for a few example lines of your site’s current redirect rules and match that format. Then you can hand that file over to your engineers, who won’t want to key your car. Everyone wins!
Live Demo
I did a live demo and Q&A about the service, which you can view below.
| Min Mark | Topic |
| 00:00:46 | Demo |
| 00:55:49 | Q&A intro |
| 00:56:43 | Where have you been? |
| 01:03:36 | What was the inspiration for this tool? |
| 01:04:04 | How would you see this being applied to a publisher site? |
| 01:05:45 | Does it work for more than just 404s? |
| 01:05:58 | How does the Expert level work? |
| 01:08:35 | If you write your own rules, can you use regex? |
| 01:10:24 | Can we provide log data instead of a crawl? |
| 01:12:00 | What if we provide analytics data but some pages from the crawl don’t have analytics data? |
| 01:13:47 | Are you going to license this as a tool? |
Pricing
Prices
The plans are broken down below. Through the end of the year, we will be offering the Consulting+ package for the cost of the Consulting package. This will give you two additional updates to use over the period of a year (compared to one in 30 days, as you’d get with the standard Consulting package).
Further Customizations
Contact us for pricing for multiple sub/domains, additional dashboards, more custom redirect rules, etc. We also build dashboards using Python and Tableau. You can view my portfolio to see some of my work that I can safely share.
White Label Option
If you’re a consultant or agency and want to white label the service, I will align the branding to match yours.
Referral Program
If you facilitate an email introduction (annie[at]annielytics[dot]com) and that organization closes within 60 days of the referral, you will receive a $1,000 referral fee for the Expert tier and higher and $500 for the DIY tier. Since it could get dicey, we’ll need that paper trail to minimize risk of colliding referrals.
Note: If you send an introduction to someone at a company that’s already been referred, the original referral will stand until their 60-day window has closed, so you may want to reach out first to ensure you will be eligible for the referral fee as only one will be paid out on any contract.
If you make an introduction to an agency, you will receive a referral for each client the agency closes on within 60 days of your referral.
Let’s Chat 📞
If you’re interested in learning more, you can request a proposal or ask questions via the form below. Or grab some time to talk about your unique needs.