Link Plumbing
Redirects, canonicals, and internal links: the technical side of link equity.
Read the blog →Earning the link was the easy part
Somebody linked to you. Then the URL changed, or the page moved behind a redirect that went through two other redirects, or a canonical tag started pointing somewhere else, or a replatform quietly turned three hundred old paths into 404s.
The link still exists. It just doesn’t arrive anywhere useful any more.
This site is about the layer where that happens: status codes, redirects, canonicals, internal links, and the configuration that decides whether an earned link keeps working.
What you’ll find here
- Status codes, precisely. 301 versus 302, 307 and 308, 404 versus 410, and what a crawler actually does with each — as distinct from what the HTTP spec says, which is a different document.
- Redirect chains. How they form, why they’re worth flattening, how to find them, and what “flatten” means when a chain crosses three systems owned by two teams.
- Canonicals are a hint. Not a command. Which means conflicts get resolved by someone other than you, and it’s worth knowing how.
- Internal linking as plumbing. Click depth, orphan pages, and the fact that a page nothing links to is a page you have opinions about and the crawler doesn’t.
- Migrations. The redirect map, the order of operations, and the specific ways sites lose their link history on replatform day.
The register here is engineering, not marketing. Behaviour over best practice: here’s what happens when a crawler encounters this, then you decide what to do about it.
You will not find “a 301 passes 85% of link equity” anywhere on this site. Nobody has published that number, and the ones in circulation were invented.
Latest posts
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301 Versus 302 and What Each Does to Link Equity
What the four redirect status codes mean, how crawlers treat them, and why the 85%-decay figure you've read has no source.
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Redirect Chains and How to Flatten Them
Chains form by accretion, not by design. How to find them, why length matters, and how to flatten one that crosses three systems.
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Canonical Tags Are a Hint, Not a Command
Why search engines ignore canonicals, which signals outvote them, and how to make your declared canonical the one that gets picked.
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Internal Linking as Plumbing
Click depth, orphan pages, and crawl paths — internal links are the only part of the link graph you fully control.
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Preserving Links Through a Site Migration
The redirect map is the migration. How to build one from the URLs that actually matter, and the order of operations on launch day.