Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 13 years 4 months 9 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
Friendster seems to have about 57 million 404 errors, and they have completely wiped out the vast majority of their users content.
Do a site: search on Friendster.com and try to go almost anywhere –
We have a few Friendster accounts, and just this morning my friend Brad who has a pretty busy 80’s fan site told me over the phone that his Friendster account lost all the content.
I looked at some of ours, and sure enough, ALL of them are empty! The accounts are still there, but our (legitimate and original) content , avatars, photo galleries etc. was all gone.
There was no message in the control panels or at login, and it only was on one of their 404 pages that I saw this message.
Following that link took me here – where they tell me this, but not WHY.
A quick company search told me that after being purchased in late 2009, Friendster has “now completed a complete makeover” and site relaunch this past week.
So after reaching a reported worldwide 115 million members in 2008, they have dropped to just 5.5 million visitors in May, as reported by Gamasutra.
OK, I still think having 5 1/5 million visitors in a month come to some of your 57 million indexed pages is nothing to sneeze at.
Why not 301 redirect?
Majestic SEO reports that they have 180,632,739 inbound links, coming from 385,086 Unique domains,
The Mozbar shows an equally impressive number, with over 6 1/2 million links from nearly 80,000 domains.
Last time I checked, backlinks were an asset, and companies did everything in their power not to generate 404’s.
I can understand the desire of the company to want to make a fresh start, and purge the web of old content, users be damned, and thats fine – it’s their choice. But that’s an awful lot of link juice to simply blow off and not 301 redirect.
Do you suppose someone made this decision consciously? If so, why?
We’ve known for a while that 301’s dont pass ALL link equity, but does someone there at Friendster believe 301 redirects have lost all their linkjuice value entirely? Of more likely, should someone be fired?
Anyway, I found it interesting…
I try to tell people that any content they post elsewhere is de facto owned buy others. Possession being 90% of the law. Which is why I bring backs down to my local machine as well as store them in the cloud.
Most of the time, all I get are blank looks.
And you’re right, that is a lot of link juice to trash. Totally squandered it they did.