What are SEO factors in re-doing a website?
-
Most of my work now involves converting older websites to CMS-based sites (in Wordpress) and I'm wondering about best practices here.
If I create a "dev" or "sandbox" directory for my development work how do I keep the pages from being indexed while I am working on the new site? Can I "noindex" a directory?
What do I do with the old html files when the new site goes live? I'm assuming I will do a 301 redirect from domain.com/index.html to the new domain.com/, and also on all of the inner pages that have equivalent pages in the new site. But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them?
-
Sorry. I just noticed that my link in my earlier response was broken.
Here is the correct links http://bit.ly/feg8co
-
Thanks. It looks like an excellent resource!
Bill
-
Thanks for your response.
In this case I am not changing the domain name, but converting the site from html/css to Wordpress. Many of the url names will stay the same, but they won't be .html files anymore.
-
Make sure you follow the steps as listed on https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en.
Proper 301 direction, new sitemap upload, change of address notification and retaining your old domain for atleast a year will make your transitions smooth.
-
_But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them? _
If any of the old pages left benind have" Page Rank" ascribed to them, you might consider creating "catch all" pages on the new site so as to be able to 301 the leftover old to the new "catch all" pages and thereby reatain the link juice.
This requires creativity as you don't want to lose usability just to catch more link juice. Not knowing your exact situation I'm not positive this is an option but mention it just incase.
-
There are tons of other issues to think about - I would suggest to make a research on that topix on that blog http://yoast.com/cat/seo/ - there you will find answers to several issues you should think about.
-
Ooops I meant plugin - Wordpress Plugin
@SEOmoz - maybe an edit feature would come in handy - the same as available in the blog comments!?
-
Thank you Thomas,
I don't quite understand what you mean by "use a Wordpress login to do a quick and dirty redirect"
Bill
-
Hi Bill,
In your new CMS, you can use this meta tag until you are ready to launch:
In regard to the old pages, 301 them to either the home page or the most relevant subpages. If there are MANY subpages, you can use a Wordpress login to do a quick and dirty redirect of all the URLs that don't occur in the CMS.
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
-
Website indexing issues
My website is being indexed with both https - https with www. and no leader at all. example. https//www.example.com and https//example.com and example.com 3 different versions are being indexed. How would I begin resolving this? Hosting?
Technical SEO | | DigitalRipples0 -
DoesHurt SEO
Hey guys, I've read mixed reviews on this. Does anyone have an answer to whether or not hiding h1 text ( ) negatively effects SEO in 2018. Thanks for the help!
Technical SEO | | Jason-Reid0 -
SEO for mobile
Hey everyone! I had just finished building my first mobile website and i wanna focus on SEO for mobile search. Now, since there is a redirection once a visitor enter to the web domain to the mobile site automatically (e.g. sample.com to m.sample.com). Question is: Where should i refer my back links to to improve my ranking on mobile result page? Would love for some help..
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
Is pointing multiple domains to a single website beneficial for SEO or not?
A client has purchased many domains with keywords in each. They want to have us point each domain to their site for better SEO. Is this a good or bad thing to do?
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup0 -
My Website Ranking is terribly drop
So sorry I really need your all help 😞 I'm really frustrated and stressed. For my website http://www.cma-academy.edu.sg , it has been ranking on Google 1st page (with the keywords "design course/design courses") for the past over 6 months and the traffic was really good... But it has been almost 2 months since the big drop... my ranking all is gone in just a week and now it's even not on the top 50.. While my competitors websites are stand stil. 😞 I seriously really want to cry because of this.. And I'm sure there is nothing much wrong with my SEO to be abandoned by Google like this and Google still index my webpage, but the crawling rate is so much slow than before.. I really need some help from the expert, especially from seomoz.. Please help me in this, I'm willing to answer any questions as well...
Technical SEO | | AngieDang0 -
When will seomoz rank my website?
Hi all, I am really excited to be here. I joined seo moz three weeks ago. Seo moz crawled my website twice and still under competitive domain analysis my domain authority is 1 and everything else underneath is zero. I fixed some errors and warning after first crawl but still nothing in root domain metrics. Can anyone please explain whats happening? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | proaspirant0 -
Mobile website settings - I am doing right?
Hi, http://www.schicksal.com has a "normal" and a "mobile' version. We are using a browser detection routine to redirect the visitor to the "default site" or the "mobile site". The mobile site is here:
Technical SEO | | GeorgFranz
http://www.schicksal.com/m The robots.txt contains these lines: User-agent: *
Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /m
Allow: / User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Disallow: /
Allow: /m Sitemap: http://www.schicksal.com/sitemaps/index So, the idea is: Only allow the Googlebot-Mobile Bot to access the mobile site. We have also separate sitemaps for default and mobile version. One of the mobile sitemap is here My problem: Webmaster tool is saying that Google received 898 urls from the mobile sitemap, but none has been indexed. (Google has indexed 550 from the "web sitemap".) I've checked the webmaster tools - no errors on the sitemap. So, if you are searching at google.com/m - you are getting results from the default web page, but not the mobile version. This is not that bad because you will be redirected to the mobile version. So, my question: Is this the "normal" behaviour? Or is there something wrong with my config? Would it be better to move the mobile site to a subdomain like m.schicksal.com? Best wishes, Georg.0 -
How To Proceed When A Portion of Website has been hijacked.
Hi - I've recently learn that a site I manage: http://www.hhisland.com has somehow been hijacked by other sites (examples below): http://wlwhost.info/schering-07-nissan-altima-air-conditioner-drain-clogged/ (460 links)
Technical SEO | | hhdentist
http://abhinav.co.uk/Mary-motorcycles-for-sale-in-iasi/ (440 links)
http://www.turetzky.net/pmr/knifty-knitter-hobo-glove-pattern.html (374 links)
http://safeimail.com/banker-cold-cstrike-16/ (233 links) Just wanted to find out what my best course of action might be? Would changing hosts (or IP address) help in this situation? Thanks!0