How to keep old URL Juice During Site Switch
-
I am switching a local businesses website to a new template. The url structure will be different. What is the best way to not loose the old urls and what content should I serve on them?
For example:
The url oldwebsite.com/product-a will no longer exist when I switch to the new template. I dont want to loose the current page rank and associate seo juice. At the same time, I do not have the resources to remap every page to the correct new page. My initial thoughts are to just display the homepage content on all of the old urls. Is this a good practice?
-
Hi Michael,
Thanks man that means a lot!
All the best,
Thomas
-
PS this will help too
If you buy http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
This free guide from Seer Interactive is better than the one that comes with it
Screaming Frog Guide to Doing Almost Anything: 55+ Ways of Looking at a Tool
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide
as Jeff stated Microsoft Excel can be one of the best tools in the world for you right now here's some info/Tools
http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/
http://seogadget.com/tools/link-categorisation-tool-for-excel/
http://seogadget.com/tools/anchor-text-tool/
http://www.johnfdoherty.com/three-phenomenal-excel-spreadsheets-for-link-analysis/
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/awesome-examples-of-how-to-use-seotools-for-excel/
-
I know this is not a domain migration however it should be treated almost exactly like one
I can if you change tell you from personal experience on quite a few jobs the link structure of a website Google long with redesigning it meaning put it on a CMS like WordPress not that WordPress is that I love it however the links are knocking to be the same. Meaning let's say you had 40 links on example.com/example.php now you will have a URL example.com/example/ or example.com/keyword-example/ only if appropriate
now you have a new website that are looking, more user-friendly, the URLs are easy to understand because of the way the written. You would think I should be better ranking.
Unfortunately the gods that Google will not allow that every time. If you do not map the 301 redirects correctly your site will lose an immense amount of traffic in fact I would say don't make the change and less you can take the time to create new 301 redirects. That point to whatever the new version of that pages is and it must be done correctly with the right amount of time.
Make sure to tell Google that you're making a change
thumbs up to Jeff He has told you exactly the way you should conduct the 301 redirects and how important they are.
Please read the URLs below as well.
What Robert says in this link is right on the money and the URLs below are regarding the SEOmoz.org to Moz.com transition while I understand that's not a cheap or quick transition it does have a very effective method for not losing value when making changes like you are doing.
Please read these 3 links
http://moz.com/community/q/changing-domains-how-much-link-juice-is-lost-with-301-redirect
http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
Although Robert does post this URL I think it should be posted again it's about telling Google what you're doing ahead of time
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
if don't know the photograph I attached is big enough however here is a link to it that is large enough and I will link to the author is Aleyda Solis it is her page to give credit where it's due.
this is full-size info-graph about what will affect the domain during a immigration
http://www.aleydasolis.com/images/seo-website-domain-migration.gif
You said You are doing this for local SEO the same woman who made the photo in the link above Aleyda Solis a local SCO expert these are some other things you should be concentrating on
http://www.aleydasolis.com/seo-local-google-places/
You will want to do a complete audit of your website before you move so you're not losing links. That means to me at least using majesticSEO, aRefs & Moz OSE
I love Moz however if you want to utilize all 3 of those tools and you're on a budget you might want to try Raven's tools & SERPS free 30 day trial out it allows you information from all 3 sources. Though I do prefer Moz
once you have done this use a free tool for up to 500 pages http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/
this will audit allow for you to make 301 redirects and map your site if you pay for the Pro version which is about €100. Well worth the money though.
Last but not least. When you make this transition you are going to need to possibly change from Apache to Nginx I'm basing this on Nginx being close to the 2nd most popular Web server in the world right now. Here are two tools that will you to drop in your Apache code and convert it to Nginx code you take what was in the .htaccess file and dropped the converted code into the Nginx config file all of these tools are excellent however the 1st one is probably the most proven that and the 3rd one lets you see both code changes made simultaneously So you can and right in Apache and watch it come out and Nginx in real time all 3 work your choice.
I hope this helps and I think everyone here has put some good information About this in here.
Best of luck to,
Thomas
-
I agree with Federico. If you don't do 301 redirects for the older pages --> mapped to the new pages, the site's rankings will likely drop like a stone. Especially if you have inbound links pointing to those older pages. Google will figure out from the new site structure what pages should be indexed. But best practice is to map the older pages to the new ones.
Depending on the site, you should be able to automate some of this, and plug it into an excel spreadsheet to come up with the 301 redirects for the .htaccess file.
If for example, the older URLs are all like: http://www.domain.com/about-us.html and the new site is http://www.domain.com/about-us/ then it's easy to create this rule and apply it more systematically (using a programmatic rule in the .htaccess file), or just plug all of the pages into a spreadsheet and have this apply:
Redirect 301 about-us.html http://www.domain.com/about-us/
You are now much later in the game, but when we are working on a new site layout that changes the URL structure, we will often map this out (page by page) early on, so that we don't miss any of the older pages on the site. And in some cases, we've made a lot of effort to keep the existing site structure, as older pages that have ranked well for 10+ years might be better left alone, without a name change.
That's my $0.02, though… I think that 301 redirects are often overlooked in the website design budget, but if you want to make sure that your client is happy 3-4 weeks from now and refers more business to you, this is a must-do item, in my professional opinion. That said, it's not fun to go over budget on a project
-
Hi,
As Fedrico mentioned the best and perhaps the only right way to do it is to redirect all old pages to corresponding new pages.
However please make sure you do a 301 redirect.
I understand that you may have time limitations owing to which you not want to redirect each url to corresponding page but if you could share some technical information about your website, I can help you speed up the process by providing dynamic 301 redirect codes which can take care of a lot of manual work on your part.
Please share the following information on my private message:
1. Website URL/s (new if its already live and old too)
2. Do you use a CMS system? If yes please mention if it's wordpress / Joomla or any other?
Thanks & Regards,
Prateek Chandra
-
I believe not. That won't be a good solution.
The best one I can suggest is you DO redirect all the old pages to the new version of them (if any) and the other ones, the ones that have no new match you should return a customized 404 perhaps with links to related pages you can have within the new design.
It will take time, yes. But that's the way to keep the most of your search traffic and pagerank.
Hope that helps.
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
-
International URL Structures
Hi everyone! I've read a bunch of articles on the topic, but I can't seem to be able to figure out a solution that works for the specific case. We are creating a site for a service agency, this agency has offices around the world - the site has a global version (in English/French & Spanish) and some country specific versions. Here is where it gets tricky: in some countries, each office has a different version of the site and since we have Canada for example we have a French and an English version of the site. For cost and maintenance reason, we want to have a single domain : www.example.com We want to be able to indicate via Search Console that each subdomain is attached to a different country, but how should we go about it. I've seen some examples with subfolders like this: Global FR : www.example.com/fr-GL Canada FR: www.example.com/fr-ca France: www.example.com/fr-fr Does this work? It seems to make more sense to use : **Subdirectories with gTLDs, **but I'm not sure how that would work to indicate the difference between my French Global version vs. France site. Global FR : www.example.com/fr France : www.example.com/fr/fr Am I going about this the right way, I feel the more I dig into the issue, the less it seems there is a good solution available to indicate to Google which version of my site is geo-targeted to each country. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | sarahcoutu150 -
Off-site company blog linking to company site or blog incorporated into the company site?
Kind of a SEO newbie, so be gentle. I'm a beginner content strategist at a small design firm. Currently, I'm working with a client on a website redesign. Their current website is a single page dud with a page authority of 5. The client has a word press blog with a solid URL name, a domain authority of 100 and page authority of 30. My question is this: would it be better for my client from an SEO perspective to: Re-skin their existing blog and link to the new company website with it, hopefully passing on some of its "Google Juice,"or... Create a new blog on their new website (and maybe do a 301 redirect from the old blog)? Or are there better options that I'm not thinking of? Thanks for whatever help you can give a newbie. I just want to take good care of my client.
Technical SEO | | TheKatzMeow0 -
Partner Sites
Hi All, Within our company we have a media group that publishes magazines and videos, the sites have footers that link to our shopping site, one of them has 118,459 links to one URL, domain authority 23, and the other 17,726 to seven URLs, domain authority 52, (there are some articles which link organically). My question is are these links because they're from identifiable companies with the same ownership worth keeping or are they detrimental? The site being linked to has a DA of 39 Cheers Stew
Technical SEO | | StewMcG0 -
What directory should a site go in (url structure)?
Hi All, The is the first actual SEO campaign i've worked on and I had a few question about where the site should live on the server and url structure. The site is in WP and we're using Yoast SEO. Anyway the site lives in a a folder called Coastal, which is a child of the WWW folder. So the permalink of the homepage is mcoastalwindows.com/coastal/. The URL is mycoastalwindows.com. The thing is I can still get to the homepage or any of the pages on the site by typing in the /coastal/. Another example is permalink mycoastalwndows.com/coastal/siding/ and url mycoastalwindows.com/siding/. The urls always display without the /coastal/, so I'm not too worried about people linking to them, but Yoast puts a canonical element to the permalink and always includes the /coastal/. Also I'm seeing that Google displays a lot of the urls with the /coastal/, which is an issue seeing as we don't link to the pages that way. My original thought was to solve this at the source and just move everything out of the coastal directory, but the developer swears that it's more secure being in another folder especially with WP. What would you all do and what is best practice? Would you move everything out of the coastal folder, 301 re-direct, do something with. htaccess, or another solution? Appreciate the input thanks!
Technical SEO | | Mario.Souza0 -
Why would this site outrank a Pr2 site with higher domain authority?
I am trying to get a pr2 site to be on top 7 local spot for the keyword Van Nuys Bail bonds but have discovered a site which has barely any back links and is not even a year old on top results. Their backlinks are from lower authority domains than what we have. How could this site be beating a 7 year old pr2 website? The site I'm working on is http://bbbail.com/ The site that is ranking in 5th spot local with pr0 is http://www.vipbailbonds.org/ is it maybe because it is a .org site? Also I notice that all websites in top spots have www, could that be a factor as well?
Technical SEO | | jesse13410 -
Why does my site rank so badly
its my turn to ask the interminable question why does my site rank so badly? site is: marriagerecords.org.uk. it was #1 for 'marriage records' on google for about 6 months. then it was 5th to 10th for about 2 months. now it is nowhere for this phrase and anything else, none of the pages I have written rank for anything. I have spent hours upon hours researching original content and I have got some great backlinks from sites like wrexham.gov.uk and somerset.gov.uk (some dont show in opensiteexplorer yet). im guessing im over-optimizing something but i'd love some concrete fixes if anyone could suggest any. thanks, tom
Technical SEO | | lethal0r0 -
Would you shorten this url, and if so how?
I designed the structure of my website way before I even thought about SEO. I run a website that requires me to categorize articles is somewhat deep nested categories so an example url would be as follows http://www.yakangler.com/articles/news/new-products/boats/item/1442-jackson-kayak-launches-the-big-tuna Would you shorten the url to somethign like this? http://www.yakangler.com/a/n/np/b/item/1442-jackson-kayak-launches-the-big-tuna If so how would you manage the redirects I'm unsure how to add a 301 redirect in my .htaccess file that wouldn't require me to add one for every single article. Could I do it with a rule that recognizes only the middle part of the url and redirect it accordingly? Thanks for any advice you might have!
Technical SEO | | mr_w0 -
Pros & Cons of deindexing a site prior to launch of a new site on the same domain.
If you were launching a new website to completely replace an older existing site on the same domain, would there be any value in temporarily deindexing the old site prior to launching the new site? Both have roughly 3000 pages, will launch on the same domain but have a completely new url structure and much better optimized for the web. Many high ranking pages will be redirected with 301 to the corresponding new page. I believe the hypothesis is this would eliminate a mix of old & new pages from sharing space in the serps and the crawlers are more likely to index more of the new site initially. I don't believe this is a great strategy, on the other hand I see some merit to the arguments for it.
Technical SEO | | medtouch0