Removing a lot of content & changing url structure.
-
I recently moved an existing ecommerce site, which I recently purchased, from Volusion to Shopify.
The new site has a completely different link structure. The old site also had about 120 products which are not even close to being up to par with the products I now have on the site. So I had to remove all of those pages too.
I was just wondering which measures I need to take to deal with this?
I created a really nice 404 page. I also 301 redirected the pages which still exist. But I was wondering if there is anything else I should do?
Should I request a removal of all the old pages, which no longer exist? Should I do something else I'm not thinking about?
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
jim
-
you could 301 everything to the closest similar product page/url instead of 404ing if these are entry pages that were ranking and getting traffic in search. by 404'ing them you'll lose those rankings, 301ing them will keep that ranking position but show the new URL in it's place.it all depend on if they were getting landing page traffic or not. also if any links are pointing to those pages and if they have any PR i would 301 them all instead of throwing the page juice away.
what could you be forgetting?
update sitemap.xml files and take the old ones off of the server and resubmit in Google
internal linking is all updated, sometimes people have blogs pointing to old URLs, if you're 404'ing then you need to update them, if you're 301'ing they can be left the way they are if it will be time consuming
make sure your robots.txt is updated, and people a lot of times put their sitemap.xml paths in the robots.txt so that would need to be updated
run a broken link checker on the site once done
-
I would be good to set up Site Search tracking and monitor the searches that are taking place. Depending on the results it might be a good idea to create a "You were looking for 'this product' but 'this product' or "this product" might be a good fit." page.
Also, make sure to check back through the links to the site and try to reach out to the websites in regards to changing the link URL. Watch GWT closely over the next few months.
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
-
Does the URL structure matter?
I have a blog on entertainment. does the url structure matter to rank my blog and iam also facing the issue of indexing of my blog. visit and check this if i need further changes.
Technical SEO | | Hammad784540 -
Canonical sitemap URL different to website URL architecture
Hi, This may or may not be be an issue, but would like some SEO advice from someone who has a deeper understanding. I'm currently working on a clients site that has a bespoke CMS built by another development agency. The website currently has a sitemap with one link - EG: www.example.com/category/page. This is obviously the page that is indexed in search engines. However the website structure uses www.example.com/page, this isn't indexed in search engines as the links are canonical. The client is also using the second URL structure in all it's off and online advertising, internal links and it's also been picked up by referral sites. I suspect this is not good practice... however I'd like to understand whether there are any negative SEO effectives from this structure? Does Google look at both pages with regard to visits, pageviews, bounce rate, etc. and combine the data OR just use the indexed version? www.example.com/category/page - 63.5% of total pageviews
Technical SEO | | MikeSutcliffe
www.example.com/page - 34.31% of total pageviews Thanks
Mike0 -
Removing CSS & JS Files from Index
Hi, Google has indexed a few .CSS and .JS files that belong to our WordPress plugins and themes. I had them blocked via robots, but realized this doesn't prevent indexation (and can likely hurt us since Google wants to access these files). I've since removed the robots instructions, submitted a removal request via Search Console, but want to make sure they don't come back. Is there a way to put a noindex tag within .CSS and .JS files? Or should I do something with .htaccess instead?
Technical SEO | | kirmeliux1 -
URL structure
Hello Guys, Quick Question regarding URL strucutre One of our client is an hotel chain, thye have a group site www.example.com and each property is located in a subfolder: www.example.com/example-boston.html , www.example.com/example-ny.html etc. My quesion is : where is better to place the language extension at a subfolder level?
Technical SEO | | travelclickseo
Should i go for www.example.com/en/example-ny.html or it is preferable to specify the language after the property name www.example.com/example-ny/en/accommodation.html? Thanks and Regards, Alessio0 -
Moz Crawl Diagnostic shows lots of duplicate content issues
Hi my client's website uses URL with www and without www. In page/title both website shows up. The one with www has page authority of 51 and the one without 45. In Moz diagnostic I can see that the website shows over 200 duplicate content which are not found in , e.g. Webmaster. When I check each page and add/remove www then the website shows the same content for both www and no www. It is not redirect - in search tab it actually shows www and then if you use no www it doesn't show www. Is the www issue to blame? or could it be something else? and what do I do since both www URL and no-www URL have high authority, just set up redirect from lower authority URL to higher authority URL?
Technical SEO | | GardenPet0 -
SEO URLs?
What are the best practices for generating SEO-friendly headlines? dashes between words? underscores between words? etc. Looking for a programatically generated solution that's using editor-written headlines to produce an SEO-friendly URL Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ShaneHolladay0 -
Should I change these "Overly dynamic URLs" ?
Hello, My client have pages that look like this: www.domain.com/blog/index.aspx?blogmonth=1&blogday=10&blogyear=2012&blogid=256 Question 1: SEOMoz say they are overly dynamic. Is it really in this case as the numbers indicate the year, month and day and do not change? Question 2: Should we change the URLs to proper SEO friendly URLs such as www.domain.com/keywords1-keyword2? The pages are already ranking well and we worry that changing the URL may damage the ranking? Do we risk the page to go down in ranking by creating SEO friendly URLs? (and using a 301 to redirect from the old URL)
Technical SEO | | DavidSpivac0 -
URL Rewrite
Using the .htaccess file how do I rewrite a url from www.exampleurl.com/index.php?page=example to www.exampleurl.com/example removing index.php?page= Any help is muchly appreciated
Technical SEO | | CraigAddyman0