Website Redesign / Switching CMS / .aspx and .html extensions question
-
Hello everyone,
We're currently preparing a website redesign for one of our important websites. It is our most important website, having good rankings and a lot of visitors from Search Engines, so we want to be really careful with the redesign.
Our strategy is to keep as much in place as possible. At first, we are only changing the styling of the website, we will keep the content, the structure, and as much as URLs the same as possible.
However, we are switching from a custom build CMS system which created URLs like www.homepage.com/default-en.aspx
No we would like to keep this URL the same , but our new CMS system does not support this kind of URLs.The same with for instance the URL: www.homepage.com/products.html
We're not able to recreate this URL in our new CMS.What would be the best strategy for SEO? Keep the URLs like this:
www.homepage.com/default-en
www.homepage.com/productsOr doesn't it really matter, since Google we view these as completely different URLs?
And, what would the impact of this changes in URLs be?
Thanks a lot in advance!
Best Regards,
Jorg
-
Hello Jeff,
Thanks for your response as well!
Like you said, I think we have to customize some things in our CMS system (Composite C1).
I found some very helpfull documents which will help us with this.With a few tweaks I hope we can leave everything the same during the migration and change things later in small steps.
Thanks a lot Jeff,
Regards,
Jorg
-
Hello Peter,
Thanks for your response!
We can indeed set up 301 redirects, that should be fine. But like most SEO's would recommend, we would like to keep everything as much the same as possible.We are currently looking for the options to adapt the new CMS systems that it lets us customize every URL on page level.
Thanks a lot!
Regards,
Jorg
-
Jorg -
I do agree with Peter; you should absolutely use 301 redirects to redirect your old page names to the new ones.
I would try to keep some consistency for your URLs, if you could.
So if the page now is www.domain.com/about.html --> go with www.domain.com/about/
This will (a) make the 301 rewrites a lot easier to do, and (b) keep things a bit more simple for you.
That said, there are ways to keep the old page name extensions intact, but it depends on your server settings and how much access you have to modify things.
For example, you could have a page that appears to be: about.html ... and ends with the .html extension, but was really a php page.
Depending on the server, this is usually a quick thing to fix, although you'll need to update your content management system to work with this.
I'm a big fan of not changing the URLs if you don't need to. You'll still do okay if you do a single 301 redirect, but more than a few hops and you'll start to loose value.
Hope this helps!
-- Jeff -
Hi Jorg
As the old site has URLs with .aspx I assume that was using a Windows server. Is the new site also on a Windows server.
I don't work on Windows server sites myself but I believe you can set up 301 redirects on your server using IIS.
For each old URL you would need to set up a 301 redirect to point it to the new URL. By doing that, bookmarked pages and links on the Internet to your site will resolve to the right page on the new site, plus search engines will also be redirected to the correct page and at the same time you will retain some but not all of any SEO value links to those pages are passing to your site.
I hope that helps,
Peter
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
-
Duplicate content question
Hey Mozzers! I received a duplicate content notice from my Cycle7 Communications campaign today. I understand the concept of duplicate content, but none of the suggested fixes quite seems to fit. I have four pages with HubSpot forms embedded in them. (Only two of these pages have showed up so far in my campaign.) Each page contains a title (Content Marketing Consultation, Copywriting Consultation, etc), plus an embedded HubSpot form. The forms are all outwardly identical, but I use a separate form for each service that I offer. I’m not sure how to respond to this crawl issue: Using a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right, because each page/form combo is independent and serves a separate purpose. Using a rel=canonical link doesn’t seem right for the same reason that a 301 redirect doesn’t seem right. Using the Google Search Console URL Parameters tool is clearly contraindicated by Google’s documentation (I don’t have enough pages on my site). Is a meta robots noindex the best way to deal with duplicate content in this case? Thanks in advance for your help. AK
Technical SEO | | AndyKubrin0 -
Lost ranking after domain switch
I recently migrated from https://whitefusemedia.com to https://whitefuse.com. The website URL structure and content remained the same and I followed all the best practice guidance regarding checks on the new domain and appropriate 301 redirects. I have seen traffic drop by about 50% and the traffic that is still coming through is mainly coming through links still listed by Google under the old domain (https://whitefusemedia.com). Is this normal? Should I expect to see this bounce back, or is there anything I can do now to regain the rankings?
Technical SEO | | wfm-uk0 -
'domain:example.com/' is this line with a '/' at the end of the domain valid in a disavow report file ?
Hi everyone Just out of curiosity, what would happen if in my disavow report I have this line : domain:example.com**/** instead of domain:example.com as recommended by google. I was just wondering if adding a / at the end of a domain would automatically render the line invalid and ignored by Google's disavow backlinks tool. Many thanks for your thoughts
Technical SEO | | LabeliumUSA0 -
Indexation question
Hi Guys, i have a small problem with our development website. Our development website is website.dev.website.nl This page shouldn't be indexed bij Google but unfortunately it is. What can i do to deindex it and ask google not to index this website. In the robots.txt or are there better ways to do this? Kind regards Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
WordPress - How to stop both http:// and https:// pages being indexed?
Just published a static page 2 days ago on WordPress site but noticed that Google has indexed both http:// and https:// url's. Usually I only get http:// indexed though. Could anyone please explain why this may have happened and how I can fix? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Clicksjim1 -
Multi Company websites
Hello SEO community ! Hope you'll have some good advice for this project. 🙂 I'm working for a group of companies just starting its SEO experience. Nowadays they have 10 different websites with different names and pretty much the same objectives. So basicly, > Would it be better to gather all website under one adress with subdomains ? They want to display almost the same info, blogs and products.. It make dupplicate content a real pain and Social Media strategy a nightmare. More info: 10 websites for 8 subsidiaries, 1 holding, 1 online shop Each subisdiary has english + its proper language They want regular posts and info updates (blogs, newsletters) They don't have all the same name They all do the same activity Online shop is full a product keywords Ideas: Working on the holding website as mother ship - for branding (social media), actu (blogs), CM (videos, and more)- Displaying the online shop products in all websites (xml) Diplaying blog updates (no full message) via xml on all websites Linking all websites to the blog, shop and holding Tks a lot !
Technical SEO | | AymanH0 -
Url canonicalization: www. to http://
Hey there. Sorry for the simple question but I recently redesigned a site and published with WordPress, in the process the domain structure changed from being www. to http:// . My question is does this change affect the value we get from links pointing to the old www. domain structure? The reason I ask is that the old site had a domain authority of 36 with OSE and a couple of hundred links but the new site address shows as having zero domain authority and zero links. Is there some best practise I should be following to retain link value?
Technical SEO | | Luia0 -
Websites not being included on google from mobiles?
Hi, Just had a call from a guy saying that google have made a statement saying that it will be stopping people finding websites from mobule devices if they dont have a mobile domain name. Doesn anyone know anything about any Google statements or is this just rubbish?
Technical SEO | | Ant710