Hi all,
I am working in Drupal which isn't always SEO-friendly. I want to convert some of our articles that are currently in an old article type to our new shiny longform template without losing SEO value. The process we use right now is to:
change the URL of the old article in the CMS from /article-title to /article-title-old
and then make the longform template /article-title in the CMS. Then hit publish. That way we can avoid having to mess with redirects.
My concerns are that this will be seen as a bait and switch by Google. They are, after all, two separate pages — node-1 and node-2 on the back end — that are being smushed into the same skin aka same URL. I don't know if updating to the new template wipes out some of the info Google may have deemed important. I guess you could argue it's a redesign by CMS but I'm still not sure. Thoughts?