When an escort leaves an agency the website administrator has to remove the escorts profile from the site. This is the norm however; if it’s not done properly it can also lead to one of the most common SEO mistakes which can damage the agency’s Google ranking.

Let me explain
http://www.your-domain.co.uk/susan.html is the url of an escort on your website however she has now left. But because her profile page has been live on the site for quite a few months and Google has already listed a link to her profile in its main index if, you deactivate her profile Google will still be sending traffic to her profile address until it removes the link from its main index which, can take up to six weeks. When visitors clicks the link to her profile in Google’s search results they will arrive at your website and be greeted by a 404 error page that will say something like the error message below:

Not Found
The requested URL /susan.html was not found on this server.
Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Five out of ten visitors when confronted with the above error message will click the back button in there browser to return to Google’s search results where they will then click on the link to another agency who no doubt are your competition. Within a matter of seconds you’ve just lost a booking and a potential regular customer for the future!

SEO Solutions
There are two methods to stop this happening

Method 1 (the easy way)
Ask your developer to add a procedure to the CMS code that, will automatically redirect traffic from the deactivated profiles to your home page. It is very important that you tell your developer that the code used must be a 301 permanent redirect, by doing this Google will transfer any link juice from the deactivated url to your home page or wherever you decide to redirect the traffic to.

Method 2 (html coding skills required)
Each time you deactivate a profile manually edit the sites .htaccess file and 301 redirect the deactivated url to your home page.