Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice

[kirbyf]

I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to:

• keep each page’s content exactly the same

• keep the same domain name

• 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url

The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content.

The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls.

I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.”

Here’s my question:

1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic?

2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url?

3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months?

Thanks.

[Version]

Hi,

I had and experience for moving not only the file structure, but also the whole domain (domain name change). We have created the 301 redirect from the old site to the new one (from every single old page to the new one). It's not the same as your case, but the general approach is exactly the same.

So it looked like

olddomainname.com/aaa > 301 >newdomainname.com/aaa

in your case it going to be as yourdomainname.com/aaaa >301> yourdomainname.com/site-collection/aaaa

Google reindexed all our new pages (about 1500 000 pages) within about 6-8 months, but we still (after more than 18 month) have old domain pages  being indexed by Google (about 10 000 pages).

Once the domain name was changed, we had started to monitor all our backlinks to be sure they all are still alive, and we've been checking them every week.  This part was the hardest to deal with, coz in spite of setting the 301 redirect, some links were lost. The problem was not connected to the re-direction from oldsite.com/aaa to newsite.com/aaa, but  to the problem that end-pages were out-dated (products out of stock etc). When we discovered this problem (shame on us!!), we had started to monitor back links more heavily. Now we do it every week to be sure we are not losing traffic due to this stupid problem.

As far as I know, there are some free apps for Shopify, dealing with 301 redirects, e.g. https://apps.shopify.com/atomseo-404-error-broken-link-checker, https://apps.shopify.com/redirectify

good luck!

[CleverPhD]

Great answer.  A good tool to use for testing the 301s in bulk is Screaming Frog.  Save a CSV list of your old URLs before you migrate.   When you update sites, set Screaming Frog in list mode and it will show you where all the old URLs 301 to.  Makes it really easy to test.

If you do have any sort of staging site to do this with, that would be optimal before you go live.  If you do go live, I would make this the first thing you do to check those 301s.  Screaming frog will quickly check a ton of them and give you some peace of mind.

Side note, the only way link juice is lost in a 301 is if you 301 to a page that does not have semantically related content to the original page.  i.e. if you have a page on Red Widgets and you 301 it to a page on Blue Bangles, Google will not pass the juice as it sees you trying to manipulate the link juice.    As you are using 301 redirect to a new URL with the exact same content, you should be fine, assuming the other points that Dirk mentions.

[DirkC]

I have migrated several sites - including changes of urls (and even domains). If done well (meaning that all pages are properly redirected from the old to the new url) there should not a be an issue. In 80% of the migrations, you couldn't even notice that there had been a migration if you looked at the search engine traffic. In the 20% where traffic was lost, it wasn't related to link juice but to other issues:

- if you change the look & feel of your pages this can have an impact on your visitors (both positive and negative - check bounce rate, time on page, avg. pages/visit) - if it's negative you can quite easily loose positions in search (resulting in lower search traffic). If your pages stay exactly the same - this shouldn't be an issue.

• Same goes with performance - if the performance of the new platform is worse than the old one - it could again have a negative impact on your users, and as a result on your position in the SERP's.

• if you change your site structure - take care of you site depth. Sometimes changing you site can push important content deeper or cause less internal links to these pages, again having a negative impact on the site's performance in the SERP's.

Nobody will be able to give you a definitive answer on your question, but as far as I know, link juice doesn't get lost with 301's, but a lot of other factors can have a severe impact.

If you loose traffic, recovery can take a long time (up to 6 months) provided you find the root cause of the problem (and it won't be the link juice). If you don't - that traffic is gone.

Hope this helps,

Dirk