Bringing a large news site back on line - anything to look out for?
-
Hi,
I'm advising an online news site site that has been completely offline for almost 6 months, and is now looking to start back up again. The site seems to be completely gone from google's cache.
This might mean moving to new hosting, but with the same URL.
The archive has about 7000 original articles. Most of these are date specific news, although there are some longer investigative pieces that are more timeless.
Is there any difference (from an SEO/digital marketing perspective) between putting the whole archive online at once, or gradually republishing the old articles?
Is there anything I should be aware of, when restarting a website of this size?
Thanks - Chris
-
Hi Chris,
First thing is I'd look at the Wayback machine and make sure you followed the same URL structure of the old site and look for any oddities.
Does the site have an old Google Webmaster Tools account? You might want to poke around in there and make sure there aren't any old URL removal requests or anything else that could potentially cause problems with the relaunch. if you don't have a GWT account, be sure to set one up.
Quite honestly, if these articles existed before, I don't see any advantage to releasing them slowly vs all at once. In fact I'd prefer all at once especially if articles linked to one another.
Finally, I'd make sure there were no penalty issues on the old site, and address them if there were. You don't want to bring any of those back to life in the process
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
-
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Help Setting Up 301 Redirects from Coldfusion Site to Wordpress Site.
I have created a new website and need to redirect all of the previous pages to the new one. The old website was built in coldfusion and the new site is built in wordpress. One of the pages I'm trying to redirect is www.norriseal.com/products.cfm to http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/. This is what I have in my .htaccess file <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">Options +FollowSymlinks
Technical SEO | | MarketHubb
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
Redirect 301 /products.cfm http://norrisealwellmark.com/products/</ifmodule> The result of this redirect is http://norrisealwellmark.com/products.cfm How do I prevent the .cfm from appending to the destination URL?1 -
New site - http or https?
Hi. We are currently in the process of creating a new website. We will be using our old domain name. However, the current website is currently live on both http and https protocols, with no re-directs in place. When we launch the new website, we would like to redirect everything to one or the other. Would the preference be to use https as the preferred protocol?
Technical SEO | | Lexica0 -
Similar pages on a site
Hi I think it was at BrightonSEO where PI DataMetrics were talking about similar pages on a website can cause rankings to drop for your main page. This has got me thinking. if we have a category about jumpers so: example.com/jumpers but then our blog has a category about jumpers, where we write all about jumpers etc which creates a category page example.com/blog/category/jumpers, so these blog category pages have no index put on them to stop them ranking in Google? Thanks in Advance for any tips. Andy
Technical SEO | | Andy-Halliday1 -
2 sets of stats for same site
Somehow on OSE I managed to get two different sets of results appear for my page. The column on the left (PA 34) is for mysite.com/ and the second column is for www.mysite.com/ .Note that these are the same site. Why do i have two different sets of results ?(note some things are the same such as google +1 & FB likes)Im concerned ive done something wrong and could have a bigger beast with both sets of results merged together. Any help much appreciated. Chris QFNeGh7
Technical SEO | | cjkimber0 -
Is there a pinging tool to ping all sites at once
hi, i am just wondering if there is a tool that you can put on your toolbar that allows you to ping all the sites at once. The last thing i want to keep doing is to go through every single one and ping my article. I would like to find a tool that does it all for me, can anyone let me know if there is one out there. many thanks
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Onsite SEO Strategy for a large accommodation site
Hi All I have been thinking about the best strategy for keyword optimisation on a forthcoming accommodation website I am involved with. This may be a bit of a newbie type question, but most of my work has been on considerably smaller sites to date.... Lets say the site will have 1 primary landing page for "Hotels in Bristol" and then 50 pages that are each for a hotel in Bristol. The aim would be for the primary page which will be a browse/search result type page to rank well for the term 'Hotels in Bristol' and other similar terms. If each of the hotel listing pages that have a hotel in Bristol on, have the phrase 'Hotel in Bristol' contained within the title, url, page content, maybe headings/alt tags etc. will the result be that the rank for the site is 'spread too thin' across the domain? Whats the best way to drive all the relevancy and keyword usage on the 50 listing pages, to the primary page such that that is the one that ranks well? And the other pages rank more for the hotel name etc? I guess one way would be to avoid using the words hotels and Bristol in the title/URL etc.. but the natural approach for usability (not SEO) would be to use these words i.e. http://www.newtravelsite.com/hotels/bristol/stgeorgeshotel/ Or would each of the 50 listing pages simply need a followed, anchored link pointing the main landing page? I'm sure there may be a fundamental technique to do this that has alluded me so far, but any help, thoughts or guidance much appreciated! Regards Simon
Technical SEO | | SCL-SEO0 -
Traffic has dropped from my site.
Hello, I never had amazing traffic, but during the last week my site seems to have almost dropped of search engines. Nothing drastic has changed during this time that I can see would have caused this. The site is http://www.comparebestodds.com Does any one have any ideas that can help? Thanks
Technical SEO | | jwdesign0
