Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Although I am still learning a lot from everyone here I usually start off on competitor research by asking my client who they think their competitors are. Then I perform searches for a range of their keywords and identify online competitors (who are often a different bunch to the clients).

Things that I look at include:

• Search Trends (Use Google Insights for keywords)
• Likihood Client + Competitors sites are to convert from users perspective
• Competitors Ranking URLs Page Authority (and Page Rank)
• Competitors Domain Authority
• What elements of onsite they are optimising
• The range of other keywords they are targeting
• Inbound Links (to domain and ranking URLs)
• Link Velocity (Majestic SEO is pretty damn good for this)
• Whether they have keywords in their URLs
• Anchor Text of inbound and internal links
• Internal Linking of sites
• Their Use of social media

This isnt an exhaustive list by any means and each time I run audits and competitive research I find new things that are (probably) affecting rankings.

The thing is, there is no way to cookie cut research as search engines themselves are evolving.

Hi Ben,

You probably want to redirect a single page if it is going to a 404. In which case you probably just want add code into the header of the problem page. Whilst you are at it, it might be worth checking that your non-www. pages are forwarding to the www versions. (http://exampledomain.com -> http://www.exampledomain.com)

PHP Redirect

Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" ); 
Header( "Location: http://www.exampledomain.com" ); 
?>

Htaccess 301 Redirect (non-www. to www.)

Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.exampledomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.exampledomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Custom 404 Page

I would also suggest a custom 404 page with links to your most popular pages, search and a back button.

Hope this helps.

C