301 redirect or maual edit of new urls
-
Hello forum!
I will get right to the point,I have a 4 year old PR4 site with lots of links (vacation rentals marketplace, like Homeaway),
In about a month from now new CMS will be ready and I will be doing redesign of the site.
The problem that I have is (as many of you can guess) losing all the old links that rank high = losing traffic / revenue.
Two posiblle solutions here:
1. 301 redirect for each page that ranks high - point it to new url
2. Manually editing new urls created by new CMS and making them to be the same as old ones. This means that some number of urls (the ones that rank high and generate traffic) would be exactly the same while other ones would be generated by CMS thus dufferent in many ways (unicode,different keywords etc.)
What would You do here?
I am more for 301 redirect but I read all kinds of horror stories in drop of SERP.
Thank You for help and advices in advance.
-
Thank You for your advice.
There is no need for change but the change is not avoidable,with new CMS we will have 22 languages + unicode characters in urls + different url structure.
If I choose to keep some of the old urls (edit new ones maually so they are the same as old ones) and for the rest of the site I let the CMS create new ones, what do You think would I have a problem with Google?
The url difference is what I am concerned about,do search engines follow some url logic when indexing a site?
To explain it better:
I have city listing url
- the old one that is ranking high has following url: domain.com/keyword/city-name
-the new ones are having : domain.com/country/city-name/keyword
If I decide to keep the old one for serbian language for example and let the CMS create new urls for other languages,would that be ok in terms of SEO?
-
I see.
In my opinion, and from my previous experience, I would say to keep the exact same URLs as the old site. If there is no specific need for new URLs (which it doesn't seem is the case) then don't change them.
Keep the same structure as the current site along with the URLs and you will see the best results. Creating new URLs then redirecting to them is only going to cause problems.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
-
Hello Matthew,
Thank You for your answer.
My old urls are not dynamic,they are well optimized with keywords and phrazes.
If You for example search "Apartmani Sutomore" my site is ranking no.1.That specific one and lots of other urls are generating a lot of traffic and its a big risk for me to lose them with upcoming season.
Not sure what to do here to tell You the truth.
All the best
Dusan
-
Hi Dusan,
I have worked on a number of projects such as this and I am actually working on a CMS migration at the moment. For this specific client we have decided to keep all of the URLs the same because they were all relevant and were ranking well in the search results.
The decision that you have to make here could be based heavily on the current state of the existing site. If your current URLs have been created very ineffectively, i.e. they are all dynamic URLs and have no keyword relevance to the page content then there may be a case for going down the 301 redirect option. What I would say is that if you go down the route of 301 redirects you WILL see drops in the SERPs.
By creating a 301 redirect to a new URL on the site you are essentially halving the PageRank going to the page from what was going to the old URL. This new URL will also need to be indexed by the search engines and if it isn't done fairly quickly then you are going to see some traffic drops.
If you let me know the URL of your existing site then I will take a quick look at it and let you know the potential risks, etc.
Matt.
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
-
Moving Blog and 301 Redirect Advice
Hello Moz Community, We recently moved our blog from its own domain to a directory on our website. We do not plan on moving over all the old blog posts because a majority most of them are based on events or time-sensitive information that has passed. We need advice on what to do with all of the old blog URL's? Should we just 301 all of them to the new blog directory on our website (www.domain.com/blog)? Should we take the time to move over all the old blog content and put the appropriate 301's in place? Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | All-Star-Vacation-Homes
Best,
Rich0 -
URL redirect question
Hi all, Just wondering whether anybody has experience of CMSs that do a double redirect and what affect that has on rankings. here's the example /page.htm is 301 redirected to /page.html which is 301 redirected to /page As Google has stated that 301 redirects pass on benefits to the new page, would a double redirect do the same? Looking forward to hearing your views.
Technical SEO | | A_Q0 -
OSE says URL redirects to URL with trailing slash but it doesn't.
Site is www.example.com/folder/us and OSE says this URL redirects to www.example.com/folder/us/, but it does not. When I look at the OSE report for the latter version with the "/" it says "No Data Available For This URL". Why would that be? The original URL is www.example.com and it redirects to www.example.com/folder/us. Is this anything I need to worry about? I thought that the trailing / doesn't really mean much anymore but nonetheless, why does it think it redirects there?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Redirect to new domain
We are moving our website from http://mysyncpad.com to http://syncpadapp.com The old site ranks pretty well for some specific keywords, will a 301 allow the new site to rank as well or will it be penalized by good for the transfer?
Technical SEO | | fifthlayer0 -
Delete 301 redirected pages from server after redirect is in place?
Should I remove the redirected old pages from my site after the redirects are in place? Google is hating the redirects and we have tanked. I did over 50 redirects this week, consolidating content and making one great page our of 3-10 pages with very little content per page. But the old pages are still visible to google's bot. Also, I have not put a rel canonical to itself on the new pages. Is that necessary? Thanks! Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
301 Redirection of entire section to the homepage
Hi Guys, So here's the deal. Let's say I have a site at mysite.com/ which talks about tomatoes, and I also have a subsection that talks about potatoes at mysite.com/potatoes I want to stop providing information about potatoes altogether so i'm thinking about doing a 301 redirection from all of the pages at mysite.com/potatoes(.*) to the home page. The thing is, mysite.com/potatoes actually has a great page authority (3475 links from 145 domains) so I really don't wan to lose all that juice... Here are my questions: Will the links be added to the ones i have for the homepage already? Since my home page and my /potatoes section ranked for 2 different subjects, how is this transfer going to affect my rankings for the homepage? will it now also rank for both tomatoes AND potatoes? How much time does it usually take for google to recognize the 301 and pass the link juice? Any other tips on optimizing this process? Thank you for your time! -francois
Technical SEO | | nyakim0 -
New website with slightly new urls
Hi we recently designed our website in work and changed some of the urls. the old site used to be http://www.example.ie/contact-us.htm now it's is http://example.ie/get-in-touch The problem we are having is with sitelinks (the ones auto generate in the serp) ie: about, contact us, team etc etc. Once cliked on, these OLD links are all going to 404 pages because of the change of url. Help with this would be greatly appreciated - I was thinking of blocking these old sitelinks in google web master.
Technical SEO | | GlenBOB0 -
How best to redirect URL from expired classified ads?
We have problem because our content are classifieds. Every ad expired after one or two mounts and then ad becomes inactive and we keep his page for one mount latter like a same page but we ad a notice that ad is inactive. After that we delete the ad and his page but need to redirect that URL to search results page which contains similar ads because we don't want to lose the traffic form that pages. How is the best way to redirect ad URL? Our thinking was to redirect internal without 301 redirection because the httacces file will be very big after a while and we are thinking to try a canonicalization because we don't want engine to think that we have to much duplicate content.
Technical SEO | | Donaab0