Site redesign/cleanup SEO Advice
-
Hi Everyone, New member here, but loving it. I have some questions that I couldn't find the answers to. We are radically changing our site. Over the years it has accumulated thousands of garbage files, WP installations, etc.
We enjoy good rankings for lots of our keywords.
Are there articles/advice/suggestions on how to do this with the least harm to our rankings?
One of the largest concerns is for pages currently ranked and we want to move them to blog posts with a preceding /blog/ in the url. The filename, title, etc. will all remain identical.
the url is www.wulongforlife.com
Sure appreciate any advice.
Thanks in advance.
-
Thank you Mark.
Wow, what a comprehensive response. I appreciate it.
I have also found some more info doing further research.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo
I will continue to post info here as I find it.
-
Julia-
Good problem to have. I can provide you with some overall suggestions related to what you need to focus on as we have brought over 20+ wordpress sites this year that are in a similar situation. Good content; good ranking; need to clean it up but dont want to lose any seo value.....
Here are some of the most important items:
- Make sure you do an upfront XML sitemap audit so you know exactly what you have. This is your opportunity to reformat it if it needs it and make sure the site is set up correctly.
- Make sure you do a crawl of the site immediately prior to making any changes so you can use it as the benchmark for what you have today and to make sure you are improving in all areas. Make sure you understand everything that is being indexed and everything that isnt being indexed.
- You care the most about content that is being indexed. So make sure you focus on that content and conversion first.
- Make sure you back up the site in its entirety. If something weird happens, you want to be able to reinstall and start back at step 1.
- You want to make sure that as you move over pages that are currently ranked that you make as few changes as possible.....Keepng the url the same with the preceding blog is a good strategy......another option might be to leave the url structure exactly the same and doing a 301 redirect from the new url might be a solid solution if there is any impact to page ranking when you change the url by adding a preceding /blog/ in the url. (IMPORTANT NOTE: You will lose a small amount of linkjuice if you do a 301 redirect. It never transfers 100% of the linkjuice.)
- Make sure you challenge some of your wordpress plugins you are using. Many of the older plugins I have been using over the last 9 months, even though i continue to install updates, have been outdone by new plugins. This is your chance to make sure you have the best. (For example I use to use an old google analytics plug-in that was solid. The new google analyticator is much easier and has more functionality and provides me a dashboard view that is handy.)
- Make sure if you have pages that have backlinks that you bring them over with the same url structure or that you do redirects from the old to the new, so that you still get the link juice.
Hope this helps.
Mark
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
-
We are migrating a site and are seeing alot of 301s and 302s already in the old site is it ok to leave those as is?
For the 3xx’s I’m not sure if it’s okay for us to redirect to these so please advise on that
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
What to do about this subdomain for SEO?
This is a bit of an unusual structure and I'm having difficulty explaining the question so pardon my being a 'noob', haha. The website I'm working on has some content under Forums that is hosted on another domain. The main website is https://yournorthside.org.au/ and if you select under the main Nav > Forums > Lived Experience it will take you to https://yournorthside.saneforums.org/t5/Lived-Experience-Forum/ct-p/lived-experience-forum. So it's as if it's a subdomain. (notice even the appearance of the main menu changes, weird) Apparently, saneforums.org has a requirement for that content to be on that subdomain. So therefore it's not part of my sitemap and now crawled or indexed. My question is is this structure okay? What are the implications for SEO? Should I be looking to implement some type of no follow link or something? Or is it actually beneficial in terms of all their content gives us 'link juice'? Can you link me to any resources / articles that give further insight?
Technical SEO | | kelseyc0 -
How could you make a URL/Breadcrumb structure appear different in Google than when you click into site?
I'm seeing a competitor be able to make their URL/Breadcrumb stucture appear different in Google than on the site. Google shows a 3-4 category silo for the page but once clicked the page is off root. How could you do this?
Technical SEO | | TicketCity0 -
Canonical Advice - ?
Hi everyone, I have a bit of problem with duplicate content on a newly launched site and looking for some advice on which pages to canonicalize. Our legacy site had product "information" pages that now 301 to new product information pages. The reason for the legacy having these pages (instead of pages where you can purchase) is because we used our vendors "cart link", which was an iframe inside the website. So in order to get ranked for these products, we created these pages, that had links to the frame where they could buy. The strategy worked, and we got ranked for our products. Now with the new site, we have those same product information pages, but when you click the link to buy, it goes to a page which now is on our actual site, where you can make the purchase, but this page contains the same basic information, though it looks very different. So my question --- the product "information" pages, are the new 301 homes and are the pages with the rank. The purchase pages are new and have no rank, but are essentially duplicate content. Should I put the canonical link element on the purchase page and tell Google to regard the information pages since those are ranked? It just seems weird to me to direct Google away from the place where people can purchase, however, the purchase pages aren't nearly as "pretty" as the information pages are, and wouldn't be the greatest landing pages. We have an automotive site, and the purchase page you have to enter vehicle information. The information page is nicer, and if the visitor is interested, its just one click to get to that page to buy. What to do here? I am fairly new to Moz, and I couldn't determine whether I am permitted to include an example link from our site of what I am referring to. Is that permitted? Thanks for any help anyone can provide.
Technical SEO | | yogitrout1
Kristin0 -
How to redirect my .com/blog to my server folder /blog ?
Hello SEO Moz ! Always hard to post something serious for the 04.01 but anyway let's try ! I'm releasing Joomla websites website.com, website.com/fr, website.com/es and so on. Usually i have the following folders on my server [ROOT]/com [ROOT]/com/fr [ROOT]/com/es However I would like to get the following now (for back up and security purpose). [ROOT]/com [ROOT]/es [ROOT]/fr So now what can I do (I gues .htaccess) to open the folder [ROOT]/es when people clic on website.com/es ? It sounds stupid but I really don't know. I found this on internet but did not answer my needs. .htaccess RewriteEngine On
Technical SEO | | AymanH
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(^/fr/.) [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.)$ /sites/fr/$1 [L,R=301] Tks a lot ! Florian0 -
Robots.txt to disallow /index.php/ path
Hi SEOmoz, I have a problem with my Joomla site (yeah - me too!). I get a large amount of /index.php/ urls despite using a program to handle these issues. The URLs cause indexation errors with google (404). Now, I fixed this issue once before, but the problem persist. So I thought, instead of wasting more time, couldnt I just disallow all paths containing /index.php/ ?. I don't use that extension, but would it cause me any problems from an SEO perspective? How do I disallow all index.php's? Is it a simple: Disallow: /index.php/
Technical SEO | | Mikkehl0 -
SEO impact of adding a forum module to a site
I help maintain a site and the owners want to start a forum for their club members. This is a site that runs on Joomla, so it's likely we'll use some form of a Joomla module to add the forum functionality. My main question is whether there is anything to be concerned about for SEO purposes when adding the forum. I've never set one up, so I don't know the best practices for forums/discussion boards (although I'm scouring the web for general info). Should it be a subdomain or on the main domain -- or does this not matter? Are there any general setup processes that I should pay attention to for SEO best-practices? This question was mainly about the SEO impact, but if anyone can point me in the direction of forum best practice info as well, It would be appreciated. Cheers!
Technical SEO | | kariel
Kristy0 -
Build links to / or without ./ on root
Hi there for linkbuilding what is better, building with / or without / www.domain.com www.domain.com/ I have been told it depends what your webserver is doing, also i was told they are the same? what does Google see? I know i need to stay consistent, just wondering which practice is better? Any help as always much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0