I just discovered this morning that an e-commerce client had changed its privacy policy URL (thanks SEORadar!) but had not bothered to redirect their old privacy policy URL to the new one. I guarantee my in-house client had no idea this change was happening (we do have a lot in common). I imagine the Legal department decided they had to update the privacy policy “immediately!”, sent it to the developers and it got pushed live.
Not a huge deal in the scheme of things, particularly when you’ve got a site with hundreds of thousands or even millions of URLs, but turns out that privacy policy URLs, particularly on sites of well-known brands, tend to get a few backlinks. In the case of the old URL, it had over 16,000.
And this brand has several other domains that also link to the old privacy policy URL that did not automatically update when they introduced the new one.
I am not saying this is going to tank their SEO, but running these kinds of things by your SEO team would have quickly flagged that the old URL should be 301 redirected to the new one which would avoid any potential issues – SEO or non-SEO – brought on by changing the URL.
I don’t object to you fancy lawyers changing URLs. But not checking with your SEO before doing so is grounds for malpractice.
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