Launching a new site with old, new and updated content: What’s best practice?
-
Hi all,
We are launching a new site soon and I’d like your opinion on best practice related to its content.
We will be retaining some pages and content (although the URLs might change a bit as I intend to replace under-scores with hyphens and remove .asp from some extensions in order to standardise a currently uneven URL structuring). I will also be adding a lot of new pages with new content, along with amend some pages and their content (and amend URLs again if need be), and a few pages are going to be done away with all together.
Any advice from those who’ve done the same in the past as to how best to proceed? Does the URL rewriting sound OK to do in conjunction with adding and amending content?
Cheers,
Dave
-
Hi Dave,
Just make sure you do all the usual SEO work on new content, tags and headers. Keyword density (although not too important but still effective).
And combining older content, just do redirects from the old URLs and that will help with any problems for backlinks.
The most important thing I emphasize on when moving to a new site structure is the redirects, and I think most would say the same.
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
-
Site Structure - Is it ok to Keep current flat architecture of existing site pages and use silo structure on two new categories only?
Hi there, I have a site structure flat like this it ranks quite well for its niche site.com/red-apples.html site.com/blue-apples.html The site is branching out into a new but related lines of business is it ok to keep existing site architecture as above while using a silo structure just for the two new different but related business? site.com/meat/red-meat.html site.com/fish/oceant-trout.html Thanks for any advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | servetea0 -
Start a new site to get out of Google penalties?
Hey Moz, I have several questions in regards to whether I should a start a new second site to save my online presence after a series of Google penalties. The main questions being: Is this the best way to spend my time/resources? If I’m forced to jump my company over to the new site can Google see that and transfer the penalty? I plan on all new content (no link redirect, no dup content) so do I need to kill the original site? Are there any Pro’s/cons I am missing? Summary of my situation: Looking at analytics it appears I was hit with both Penguin 2.0 and 2.1, each cutting my traffic in half, despite a link remediation campaign in the summer of 2013. There was a manual penalty also imposed on the site in the fall of 2013, which was released in early 2014. With Penguin 3.0’s release at the end of 2014, the site saw a slight uptick in organic traffic, improving from essentially nothing to next to nothing. Most of the site’s issues revolved around cheap $5 links from India in the 2006-09 time frame. This link building was abandoned, and replaced with nothing but “letting them happen naturally” from 2010 through the 2013 penalties. Since 2013 we have done a small amount of quality articles on a monthly basis to promote the site, social media, and continuous link remediation. In addition the whole site has been redesigned, optimized for speed/mobile, secured, and completely rewritten. Given all of this, the site has really only recovered to page 2 and 3 of the SERPs for our key words. Even after a highly circulated piece appeared on an Authority site (97 DA) a few months ago there was zero movement. It appears we have an anvil tied around our leg until Penguin 4.0. With all of the above, and no sign of when the next penguin will be released, I ask, is it time to start investing in a new site? With no movement in 2.5 years, it’s impossible to know where my current site stands, so I don’t know what else I can do to improve it. I am considering slowly building a new site that is a high quality informational site. My thought process is it will take a year for a new site to gain any traction with Google. If by that time my main site has not recovered, I can jump to that new site, add a commercial component, and use it as a life boat for my company. If I have recovered, then I have a future asset. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Shoemaker with ugly shoes : Agency site performing badly, what's our best bet?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AxialDev
We're a web agency and our site www.axialdev.com is not performing well. We have very little traffic from relevant keywords. Local competitors with worse On-page Grader scores and very few backlinks outrank us. For example, we're 17th for the keyword "agence web sherbrooke" in Google.ca in French. Background info: In the past, we included 3 keywords-rich in the footer of every site we made (hundreds of sites by now). We're working to remove those links on poor sites and to use a single nofollow link on our best sites. Since this is on-going and we know we won't be able to remove everything, our link profile sucks (OSE). We have a lot of sites on our C-Block, some of poor quality. We've never received a manual penalty. Still, we've disavowed links as a precaution after running Link D-Tox. We receive a lot of trafic via our blog where we used to post technical articles about Drupal, Node js, plugins, etc. These visits don't drive business. Only a third of our organic visits come from Canada. What are our options? Change domain and delete the current one? Disallow the blog except for a few good articles, hoping it helps Google understand what we really do. Keep donating to Adwords? Any help greatly appreciated!
Thanks!2 -
New indepth page for content marketing - feedback?
I finally figured out that to EARN quality links I need some great content that I can share. Content that is valuable to people. So I created a (indepth?) article with some pretty sweet infographics. This is NEW to me. So I was hoping I could get some feedback on this before I attempt to promote it to media and industry publishers. Here is the link: http://www.titanium-jewelry.com/jewelry-insurance-info.html Would love your feedback and suggestions! Thanks ron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yatesandcojewelers2 -
New Google Update?
Hey guys, So I have noticed a few of my clients rankings drop suddenly as of last week. They went from page 1 to page 4 and I they have been on page 1 for years, it happened around 17/01/2013. Anyone heard anything about a new update? Sample URL & Keyword: http://www.childrensfunkyfurniture.com/childrens-beds Childrens Beds Your help would be appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversiontactics0 -
What's the best method for segmenting HTML sitemap?
Hello all, I was wondering if anyone can help me. Currently I'm trying to set up a HTML sitemap for our website and am having trouble with the 500+ pages of content under each category. How do you segment your HTML sitemap in a case like this, keeping in mind the less than 100 links per page rule? For example, http://www.careerbliss.com/salary/ allows our users to search salaries under company, job title, and location. You can imagine how many thousands of pages we need to represent. Any help will be greatly appreciated! Cheers! Reyna
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CareerBliss0 -
Pros and Cons of new subdomain and redirecting old subdomain?
Hi guys, I am thinking about redirecting the ranking subdoman to a new subdomain which has my main keyword within it. I am trying to outrank an exact match competitor and don't seem to be able to do so. For example: page.example.com would be my existing ranking URL which is very powerful, and I am thinking about redirecting this to a new URL being keywordpage.example.com What are your thoughts on do this? Thanks B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HaymarketMediaGroupLtd0