Site restructure question

[PM_Academy]

Our site was deigned years ago to target customers in specific cities, now we've grown beyond this and I believe it is time to change the site structure.  
Ignore the 302 from the root page.

Current structure: (assuming you've never been to our site before)

projectmanagementacademy.net 302->/select-location.php

/select-location.php -> /city-name/pmp-training.php This page was meant to be a "homepage" for each city, pointless page really

/city-name/pmp-training.php -> /ciy-name/product-name.php These pages are for each individual product

My suggested site structure:

/city-name/pmp-training.php becomes projectmanagementacademy.net no more redirect /city-name/pmp-training.php gets removed and 301 to root page.

/product-name.php each product's page and you would select a location when necessary (some products are online only) would 301 each /city-name/product-name to corresponding product page

/product-name/city-name.php could add these pages if we still wanted the city name in url for city specific products

My thoughts here are /product-name.php would receive a higher % of link juice because there are fewer page between 2 vs 4 if you came to the root page. and 2 vs 3 if you came from the select-location page.  Also instead of being split between over 50 locations, all these would be together on one page.

• Your thoughts?
• Would this change improve our SERP for those product pages?
• Would we see a drop off in traffic if we did this?
• How long, if done correctly, would it take to see the recovery of rankings and traffic?
• Could we 301 /select-location.php to the root page?

Thanks in advance for your insights to this.  Any answer is a good answer.

Trenton

[PM_Academy]

You guys are awesome and lifesavers!  I'll report back, after we do the change, and let everyone know how this all went!  Thanks a million!

[Everett]

Trenton this is a great question. Yes, you should go ahead and redirect that page to the new home page, as it was your former home page. Even though the content is different you should be able to move the pagerank over to the new home page by use of the 301 redirect. Google does treat some redirects to the home page as a 404, such as when someone redirects every page from one domain to the homepage of another, but I think you will be fine in this situation.

[ReferralCandy]

I think it would be a good idea to redirect your select-location page to your new homepage. You will be able to take advantage of the link juice obtained, before Google re-indexes your pages. Moreover, doing a redirect is better than directing your visitors to a 404 page - they will be annoyed with the latter and likely to leave your site immediately.

[PM_Academy]

I appreciate the response, hopefully we can get a moz employee to help out too.  It would go a long way in convincing the dev team that the change is necessary.  I did multiple searches and never truly found concrete document saying how this would affect us.

Also, could we 301 our select-location page to our new homepage? They would not be the same content and I was curious if this would have a negative effect on our website. That page has the majority of the backlinks to our site, and I'd rather not lose them.

[ReferralCandy]

Hi Trenton,

If I understand correctly, you are restructuring your site to a product-centric structure, as compared to a location-centric structure? If that is the case, I certainly think this is a better structure. From what I see, you have similar content across each of your city site, which doesn't look good from a SEO perspective since they can be treated as duplicate content. If your company is offering the same range of products across several locations, it will be a good idea to focus on developing product pages as compared to city pages.

You may notice a slight drop in SERP temporarily by when changing your site structure, but with proper 301 redirects and some time, your SERP shouldn't be greatly affected. Consolidating information on your site will go a long way in improving your SERP in the long term.

Hope that helps!