Removing a lot of content & changing url structure.
-
I recently moved an existing ecommerce site, which I recently purchased, from Volusion to Shopify.
The new site has a completely different link structure. The old site also had about 120 products which are not even close to being up to par with the products I now have on the site. So I had to remove all of those pages too.
I was just wondering which measures I need to take to deal with this?
I created a really nice 404 page. I also 301 redirected the pages which still exist. But I was wondering if there is anything else I should do?
Should I request a removal of all the old pages, which no longer exist? Should I do something else I'm not thinking about?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
jim
-
you could 301 everything to the closest similar product page/url instead of 404ing if these are entry pages that were ranking and getting traffic in search. by 404'ing them you'll lose those rankings, 301ing them will keep that ranking position but show the new URL in it's place.it all depend on if they were getting landing page traffic or not. also if any links are pointing to those pages and if they have any PR i would 301 them all instead of throwing the page juice away.
what could you be forgetting?
update sitemap.xml files and take the old ones off of the server and resubmit in Google
internal linking is all updated, sometimes people have blogs pointing to old URLs, if you're 404'ing then you need to update them, if you're 301'ing they can be left the way they are if it will be time consuming
make sure your robots.txt is updated, and people a lot of times put their sitemap.xml paths in the robots.txt so that would need to be updated
run a broken link checker on the site once done
-
I would be good to set up Site Search tracking and monitor the searches that are taking place. Depending on the results it might be a good idea to create a "You were looking for 'this product' but 'this product' or "this product" might be a good fit." page.
Also, make sure to check back through the links to the site and try to reach out to the websites in regards to changing the link URL. Watch GWT closely over the next few months.
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
-
Canonical URL
Hi there Our website www.snowbusiness.com has a non www version and this one has 398 backlinks. What is the best way of transfering this link value if i establish the www. address as the canonical URL? Thanks, Ben
Technical SEO | | SnowFX0 -
If content is at the bottom of the page but the code is at the top, does Google know that the content is at the bottom?
I'm working on creating content for top category pages for an ecommerce site. I can put them under the left hand navigation bar, and that content would be near the top in the code. I can also put the content at the bottom center, where it would look nicer but be at the bottom of the code. What's the better approach? Thanks for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
URL Structure for Deal Aggregator
I have a website that aggregates deals from various daily deals site. I originally had all the deals on one page /deals, however I thought that maybe it might be more useful to have several pages e.g. /beautydeals or /hoteldeals. However if I give every section it's own page that means I have either no current deals on the main /deals page or I will have duplicate content. I'm wondering what might be the best approach here? A few of the options that come to mind are: 1. Return to having all the deals on one page /deals and linking internally to content within that page
Technical SEO | | andywozhere
2. Have both a main /deals page with all of the deals plus other pages such as /beautydeals, but add re="canonical" to point to the main /deals page
3. Create new content for the /deals page... however I think people will probably want to see at least some deals straight away, rather than having to click through to another page.
4. Display some sub-categories on the main /deals page, but have separate URLs for other more popular sub-categories e.g. /beautydeals (this is how it works at the moment) I should probably point out that the site also has other content such as events and a directory. Any suggestions on how best to approach this much appreciated! Cheers, Andy0 -
Change in url structure - added category page
I have recently started an e-commerce website and have now changed the url structure and added another level to my category pages. So where it before was www.website.com/shirts it is now www.website.com/clothes/shirts. So I added the clothes category (just an example) before the shirt category and am now finding that the old url is still found in the search index and is still live on my site. How could this be? I use wordpress and simply change the urls in the backend. The products are still under www.website.com/product/blue-shirt-123 so they won't be affected but I suppose it now means I have duplicate category pages? So my question is: Should I 301 the the old category page (www.website.com/shirts)to the new url (www.website.com/clothes/shirts). And how can the old url still be live on my site? If this was a bit unclear, please let me know. Appreciate your replies!
Technical SEO | | bitte0 -
Landing Page URL Structure
We are finally setting up landing pages to support our PPC campaigns. There has been some debate internally about the URL structure. Originally we were planning on URL's like: domain.com /california /florida /ny I would prefer to have the URL's for each state inside a "state" folder like: domain.com /state /california /florida /ny I like having the folders and pages for each state under a parent folder to keep the root folder as clean as possible. Having a folder or file for each state in the root will be very messy. Before you scream URL rewriting :-). Our current site is still running under Classic ASP which doesn't support URL rewriting. We have tried to use HeliconTech's ISAPI rewrite module for IIS but had to remove it because of too many configuration issues. Next year when our coding to MVC is complete we will use URL rewriting. So the question for now: Is there any advantage or disadvantage to one URL structure over the other?
Technical SEO | | briankb0 -
Our UE team has presented me with a site structure where the content (folders) does not match the hierarchical directory structure (in the CME)
Our UE team has presented me with a new site structure where the content (folders) does not match the hierarchical directory structure (in the CME). I.E Sub-sectors, sectors and product pages are ALL just 1 directory off the root. example.com/sector example.com/sub-sector example.com/productpage FYI 'normal' folder hierarchy would be; example.com/sector/ example.com/sector/sub-sector example.com/sector/sub-sector/productpage I cannot find any SEO disadvantages re; crawl, if anything the SE's will crawl more efficeitly with clearly less depth... higher 'deep content', and a better nav - which is technically a sound solution with link consistency throughout - 1 to 2 clicks to all pages. Only disadvantage might be a user confusion... which can be off-set with contextual breadcrumbs. Are there any PURE SEO disadvantages to a structure this illogical? Note - This does not abuse any Search Engine guidelines. Thanks for reading, Rich
Technical SEO | | richcowley0 -
Duplicate Content via a product feed & data
We have uniquely created all of our product content on our website (Titles, product descriptions, images etc). However, we are also a manufacturer of these products and supply to a number of trade customers. These customers often wish to setup their own websites to re-sell these products. In the past we have quite happily given this content in order to assist our customers sell on their sites. Generally we give them a 'data dump' of our web data and images, but reading about duplicate content this will lead to the search engines seeing lots of identical content on these customer sites. Whilst we wish to support our customers we do not want to harm our (and their) site by issuing lots of duplicate content around the web. Is there a way we can help them with the data without penalizing ourselves? The other issue is that we also take this data feed and use it to sell on both Amazon & Googlebase. Will using this identical data also rank as duplicate content as a quick search does show both our website and amazon product page? When creating Amazon listing do these need to vary from the standard website descriptions? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bwfc770 -
Directory URL structure last / in the url
Ok, So my site's urls works like this www.site.com/widgets/ If you go to www.site.com/widgets (without the last / ) you get a 404. My site did no used to require the last / to load the page but it has over the last year and my rankings have dropped on those pages... But Yahoo and BING still indexes all my pages without the last / and it some how still loads the page if you go to it from yahoo or bing, but it looks like this in the address bar once you arrive from bing or yahoo. http://www.site.com/404.asp?404;http://site.com:80/widgets/ How do I fix this? Should'nt all the engines see those pages the same way with the last / included? What is the best structure for SEO?
Technical SEO | | DavidS-2820610