Domain restructure, sitemaps and indexing
-
I've got a handcoded site with around 1500 unique articles and a handcoded sitemap. Very old school.
The url structure is a bit of a mess, so to make things easier for a developer who'll be making the site database-driven, I thought I'd recategorise the content. Same content, but with new url structure (I thought I'd juice up the urls for SEO purposes while I was at it)
To this end, I took categories like:
/body/amazing-big-shoes/
/style/red-boots/
/technology/cyber-boots/And rehoused all the content like so, doing it all manually with ftp:
/boots/amazing-boots/
/boots/red-boots/
/boots/cyber-boots/I placed 301 redirects in the .htaccess file like so:
redirect 301 /body/amazing-boots/ http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/
(not doing redirects for each article, just for categories which seemed to make the articles redirect nicely.)
Then I went into sitemap.xml and manually overwrote all the entries to reflect the new url structure, but keeping the old dates of the original entries, like so:
<url><loc>http://www.site.co.uk/boots/amazing-boots/index.php</loc>
<lastmod>2008-07-08</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority></url>And resubmitted the sitemap to Google Webmasters.
This was done 4 days ago. Webmaster said that the 1400 of 1500 articles indexed had dropped to 860, and today it's climbed to 939.
Did I adopt correct procedure? Am I going about things the right way? Given a little time, can I expect Google to re-index the new pages nicely?
I appreciate I've made a lot of changes in one fell swoop which could be a bit of a no-no... ?
PS Apologies if this question appears twice on Q&A - hopefully I haven't double-posted
-
If your developer will be making the website dynamic via a system like WordPress there will be automated ways to keep your sitemap up to date every time you publish a new page to your system and then it will even ping the search engines that the sitemap is updated It will be a "set it and forget it" type of thing with sitemaps if you are moving in that direction
Good luck!
-
Oh, no what you did is perfect! I guess I meant the site architecture/navigation, but you answered it in your original post when you said "Same content" so disregard that question. Congrats.
-
Sadly I did change the internal linking structure, so that internal links now point to new urls not the old ones. The good news is that even with changing the internal linking structure, Google seems to be keeping abreast of it all. The number of urls indexed has now jumped - in a day - from 939 to 1024, so good old Google is clearly keeping up with the changes. Looks like my fears were ungrounded. Yay
-
Looks perfect to me too. Did the internal linking structure change at all or is that still the same? If it's all the same you should be right back where you were in no time. And you should see some benefits from having a more common sense, easy to understand URL structure. Cheers!
-
That's fair. I get that you're not recommending it personally - but it does seem popular with consistently good feedback from people, so I'll give it a go
-
Just to clarify, I know the sitemap tool I mentioned is very popular. Many small sites use it because it is online, fast and free. I have used it a few times myself. I can't necessarily say I recommend it because I have never personally purchased the software. I would say that if I was looking to obtain a sitemap for your site, I would start with that tool but may take a look at some others.
-
Thanks Ryan, that's a weight off my mind. I'll definitely take up your advice on the sitemap generator, too. Thanks for the recommendation - I'd seen a few around, but wasn't sure - it's great to be pointed in the right direction!
-
Did I adopt correct procedure? Am I going about things the right way? Given a little time, can I expect Google to re-index the new pages nicely?
I would say Yes to all three, but clarify with details below.
When you submit a sitemap to Google with 1500 pages, there is no guarantee they will index all of your pages. It sounds like you have done a lot of intensive, manual work. Fortunately, you have done things the correct way in properly redirecting each page to the new URL. If Google indexed 1400 pages before, they should index around that same number once again. It may take several weeks depending on a few factors such as your site's Domain Authority, navigation and how many links each page has received.
With respect to the sitemap, I would highly recommend using sitemap generation software. It is simply not reasonable to manually update a sitemap with 1500 entries. I would have updated the lastmod date on the sitemap but it may not make any difference.
A popular sitemap tool: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/. The free version only generates 500 pages, but for $20 you can buy the full version and automate it.
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
-
How to redirect old domain to new domain.
We just recently signed up to Moz with hopes of fixing our Moz Ranking. We have an old domain - http://at-net.net and a new domain - https://www.expertip.net We have set up 301 (Permanent) redirects from all pages on the old site to the new, but aren't getting the ranking or aren't getting recognized from external links to the old sites. I've read the moz article on 'Link Juice' and followed those practices, but it doesn't seem to help. Does anyone have advice on doing this? Thanks in advance,
Technical SEO | | greg.lanier
Greg0 -
Using a single sitemap for multiple domains
We have a possible duplicate content issue based on the fact that we have a number of websites run from the same code base across .com / .co.uk / .nl / .fr / .de and so on. We want to update our sitemaps alongside using the href lang tags to ensure Google knows we've got different versions of essentially the same page to serve different markets. Google has written an article on tackling this:https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/75712?hl=en but my question remains whether having a single sitemap accessible from all the international domains is the best approach here or whether we should have individual sitemaps for each domain.
Technical SEO | | jon_marine0 -
Site Indexed but not Cached?
I launched a new website ~2 weeks ago that seems to be indexed but not cached. According to Google Webmaster most of the pages are indexed and I see them appear when I search site:www.xxx.com. However, when I type into the URL - cache:www.xxx.com I get a 404 error page from Google.
Technical SEO | | theLotter
I've checked more established websites and they are cached so I know I am checking correctly here... Why would my site be indexed but not in the cache?0 -
Should we 301 redirect our old domain to the new domain
We have a product that when started was under the domain appnowgo.com. We've since changed the name and the domain is now knackhq.com. The latter domain doesn't rank nearly as well as the former for many of the keywords we are targeting. For example... "online database builder" and "web app builder" are two of those keywords. Obviously having app in the domain is not a bad thing but it is our old name. The question is, should we 301 the appnowgo.com domain to knackhq.com? Or should we use that better rank and just link users to knackhq.com from the appnowgo.com site until we can increase our ranking for knackhq.com? We don't plan to update the content on appnowgo.com anymore and we obviously don't want to drop off rank if at all possible. Thanks! Eric
Technical SEO | | sitestrux0 -
Does Google index has expiration?
Hi, I have this in mind and I think you can help me. Suppose that I have a pagin something like this: www.mysite.com/politics where I have a list of the current month news. Great, everytime the bot check this url, index the links that are there. What happens next month, all that link are not visible anymore by the user unless he search in a search box or google. Does google keep those links? The current month google check that those links are there, but next month are not, but they are alive. So, my question is, Does google keep this links for ever if they are alive but nowhere in the site (the bot not find them anymore but they work)? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Is it better for our Blog to be blog.domain.tld or domain.tld/blog ?
I'd dread the answer being the latter rather than the former as we've spent two years building it blog.domain... However I noticed SEOmoz are domian.tld/blog and it got me thinking.... Cheers. R.
Technical SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
I think I have a penalty on my domain...
my domain is www.brighttights.com it is an affiliate marketing website in the niche of tights and lingerie. A few months back my traffic was pretty good, doing about 500 hits a day from product search terms only. After the panda updates I blocked all the product pages from google as they were duplicate content and I am now working on a program of seing for the category and homepages instead. I am using much more generic, and high volume, keywords for these. Several months later I seem to not only be down to 7 people a day on my website but i'm not even ranking for terms such as "bright tights". I used to be no1 for this. I have domain authority of 27 so it's not terrible, competitors on the first page range from 45 to 9. This lack of ranking for the sites name/domain name term is leading me to wonder if I have a penalty on the site. Any feedback would be gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
New domain
Hi, I have a domain with no keywords on it, and I´ve been using it for years. Now I bought another domain with the keyword on it. I whant to work on seo for the second domain, with the keyword. What is the better way to work this out? 301? Duplicate de site? redirect in another way?
Technical SEO | | mgfarte0