Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Would it be better to Start Over vs doing a Website Migration?
-
Hey guys /gals
I have a question please. I have a computer repair business that does extremely well in search and is on the front page of google for anything computer repair related.
However, I am currently re-branding my company and have completely redesigned every aspect of the UI and the SEO Site structure as well as the fact that I have completely written vastly different content and different title tag lines and meta descriptions for each page.
So basically when doing a migration we know that we want to keep our content, titles, headlines and meta descriptions the same as to not lose our page rank.
Seeing that I have completely went against the grain in all directions on a much needed company re-branding and everything is completely different from the old site is it even worthwhile 301 redirecting my old urls to the new ones that would (best) correspond with the new?
In the plainest English, would I do better at Ranking the New Website QUICKER without doing 301 redirects from the OLD to the NEW?
In an EXTREME instance like what I have done, would the Domain Migration IMPEDED me ranking the new site seeing how nothing is the same?
I have build a Rock solid SILO Site Architecture on the New site which is WordPress using the Thesis Framework and the old domain is built on JOOMLA 1.5
Thank fellas
Marshall
-
Hey thanks Keri and how are you?
-
Moz has recently had a little bit of experience with a rebrand, changing domains, changing URLs, implementing redirects, and a variety of other fun things to keep us busy. Ruth Burr, our in-house SEO, is giving a Mozinar that talks in-depth about this migration on Thursday, with a chance for you to ask questions at the end. If you're not able to attend the webinar, we'll have it online for download within two days.
You can reserve your spot at http://moz.com/webinars, as well as see all the past webinars we've done, and what else is scheduled in the future.
-
Hi Marshall,
one resource I think is very valuable regardless of if someone is new or have been doing it for long time this is a great search engine optimization is this guide please do not think that I am giving you this because I think you are a beginner I know you are not. And I agree with you Google has made things kind of nuts in the last 3 to 5 years.
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
It is definitely the right place to start if you are just picking up after a couple years off.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thanks gents and figured as much.
I had to ask though. Although I am very good at SEO and coding and everything else, that means moot if you are not current with the recent GOOGLE drama that has been punishing everyone for the last 2 years now.
3-5 years ago, I could build a site and rank it on the first page for pretty much everything without even doing any back link building but...once again.. we are talking 5 years ago when things were a lot different and a lot less harder too.
Never hurts to ask the folks that do this stuff for their primary source of income know what I mean fellas?
Thanks once again to all of you for your responses to my question.
Sincerely,
Marshall : )
-
Just like the 2 suggestions, it's really best to keep both sites. Move forward with the new site and re-brand your company but don't scrap the original website. Add a banner, write up, some news explaining the re-brand and point the original site to the new site. You'll create a backlink and if the person is genuinely interested in what you have to offer, they'll follow to the new website.
301 any page that are relevant from the original site to the new site. If both sites have a products page then you can point it over. Google will naturally figure out what you did and start passing any relevant benefits to the new site.
-
Hi Marshall,
You're rebuilding your current website in WordPress using thesis framework. And you're asking basically if you you should do 301 redirects or not?
Absolutely you should do 301 redirects if you want to keep any part of your rank which sounds like it is doing pretty good. I would feel when redirect every page to the new page that has taken it's place. Also for word press I would strongly recommend using manage WordPress hosting
WP engine, zippykid, web synthesis, and Pagely are excellent choices.
I hope I've been of help,
Thomas
-
Please...dear God don't scrap your website (especially if you are ranking well for it). Even if the content is completely different, figure out where to redirect your legacy pages to and use 301 redirects. Just make sure that you are doing one to one redirects to maintain as much of your link equity as possible. Sorry for such a short and simple response to your long question, but this only required a simple answer. If you are offering the same products or services create a massive .htaccess file and redirect the hell out of your old site.
You owe me a Coke.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Possible to Migrate Website Design to Different Theme?
Last year we purchased a $79 them and coded a new designer our real estate website. The database of listings was transferred to the new theme. A year later we realize the new theme is not that fast; does not perform great, so despite optimizing our server we are not getting very fast performance. So, my question is, can we take the design, the CSS of our current theme (and database) and transfer it to a better performing theme? We are in a very competitive niche and our website must perform quickly both desktop and mobile. If this is feasible is this a major production? Note we are very happy with the design and this would solely be to improve download speeds to improve the user experience and get better ranking. Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Location Pages On Website vs Landing pages
We have been having a terrible time in the local search results for 20 + locations. I have Places set up and all, but we decided to create location pages on our sites for each location - brief description and content optimized for our main service. The path would be something like .com/location/example. One option that has came up in question is to create landing pages / "mini websites" that would probably be location-example.url.com. I believe that the latter option, mini sites for each location, would be a bad idea as those kinds of tactics were once spammy in the past. What are are your thoughts and and resources so I can convince my team on the best practice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ-Rodgers0 -
Silo vs breadcrumbs in 2015
Hi ive heard silos being mentioned in the past to help with rankings does this still apply? and what about breadcrumbs do i use them with the silo technique or instead of which ones do you think are better or should i not be using these anymore with the recent google updates?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | juun0 -
Hreflang in vs. sitemap?
Hi all, I decided to identify alternate language pages of my site via sitemap to save our development team some time. I also like the idea of having leaner markup. However, my site has many alternate language and country page variations, so after creating a sitemap that includes mostly tier 1 and tier 2 level URLs, i now have a sitemap file that's 17mb. I did a couple google searches to see is sitemap file size can ever be an issue and found a discussion or two that suggested keeping the size small and a really old article that recommended keeping it < 10mb. Does the sitemap file size matter? GWT has verified the sitemap and appears to be indexing the URLs fine. Are there any particular benefits to specifying alternate versions of a URL in vs. sitemap? Thanks, -Eugene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_bgb0 -
Archiving a festival website - subdomain or directory?
Hi guys I look after a festival website whose program changes year in and year out. There are a handful of mainstay events in the festival which remain each year, but there are a bunch of other events which change each year around the mainstay programming.This often results in us redoing the website each year (a frustrating experience indeed!) We don't archive our past festivals online, but I'd like to start doing so for a number of reasons 1. These past festivals have historical value - they happened, and they contribute to telling the story of the festival over the years. They can also be used as useful windows into the upcoming festival. 2. The old events (while no longer running) often get many social shares, high quality links and in some instances still drive traffic. We try out best to 301 redirect these high value pages to the new festival website, but it's not always possible to find a similar alternative (so these redirects often go to the homepage) Anyway, I've noticed some festivals archive their content into a subdirectory - i.e. www.event.com/2012 However, I'm thinking it would actually be easier for my team to archive via a subdomain like 2012.event.com - and always use the www.event.com URL for the current year's event. I'm thinking universally redirecting the content would be easier, as would cloning the site / database etc. My question is - is one approach (i.e. directory vs. subdomain) better than the other? Do I need to be mindful of using a subdomain for archival purposes? Hope this all makes sense. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cos20300 -
Effects of having both http and https on my website
You are able to view our website as either http and https on all pages. For example: You can type "http://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as http: as you navigate the site. You can also type "https://mywebsite.com/index.html" and the site will remain as https: as you navigate the site. My question is....if you can view the entire site using either http or https, is this being seen as duplicate content/pages? Does the same hold true with "www.mywebsite.com" and "mywebsite.com"? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rexjoec1 -
DNS or 301 Website Redirect
We are running a marketplace site, so we have thousands of vendors selling their products on our site. Each vendor has a Profile page and we are soon to launch a premium store-front that is white label. Many of these vendors will want to point a custom url to their premium store-front (which is a sub domain of the marketplace) and we are trying to get an understanding of how we should instruct them to point their url in a way that will give the main marketplace site the seo juice. We also want to understand what will show up in the address bar. Will it be their url or our sub domain? Will any of the marketplace seo juice boost their url local listing status?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bloomnation0 -
Server Migration, Does it effect SEO?
About to go through a server migration. My intitial thought is that a change in servers shouldn't really change my rankings. But I've heard rumors... Can a server migration change rankings? Why?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Thos0030