Redesign Launch with change from ASP to PHP

[DerekM88]

My client is launching a new corporate website redesign. But the trick is, their old site was built in ASP and they want the new site to be a Wordpress site, built in PHP.

Their current website has A PR4/10 and MANY backlinks to its pages. I don't want to risk any SEO authority and make sure the transition is smooth. The current site only has less than 75 pages.

Can anyone give me a checklist of things I need to make sure get done? And how to do each?

For example:

1. How to forward the old domain to new URLs... (301s? DNS? HT Access?..not savvy)

2. Keep all the same URLs?

3. Don't change any content?...etc.

4. Submit new sitemap? or robots.txt file?

Also, I wanted to add a Wordpress Blog to the new site for SEO purposes, but since it's being built in Wordpress, do you recommend I have a subdomain on this site as www.blog.website.com? Or is this now not necessary since the entire thing is built in wordpress?

I would REALLY appreciate your time helping me on this. Thanks!

Derek

[kadesmith]

Clean URLs will help you out a lot, but you will probably still your site dance a little bit as Google gets to know the new content.  You're not going to see near the damage though I first mentioned.  The more you can keep it like the old the better.  If you clean it up a little bit as you implement the pages, you could actually see an increase in your rankings when things settle down because it will look like fresh content to Google.

[DerekM88]

New Development:

I don't know if this changes the game or not, but I just found out that Clean URLs are currently being used in the site. So changing a webpage with the URL www.website.com/page3 that is built in .asp should not be affected (at least not for people who provide us backlinks) by changing the same page to have the same URL, but the only difference being that it is built in .php now. Would I be correct to assume this? And would we still see the damage you mentioned above if having these Clean SEO-friendly URLs is the case?

[kadesmith]

I'm afraid you're going to feel this one no matter what effort you go to, but you can definitely minimize the pain.  You WILL see a drop in traffic, but oftentimes a change like this is necessary for long-term success.  Long-term in this case can be up to a year and you may see traffic drop by as much as 80%, so be prepared.

301 Redirects:  Take full advantage of 301's.  Try as hard as possible to make sure you have a place to point all the old pages to in the new site.

404: If  When you run in to a situation where you just can't 301, be sure to set up custom 404's to help search engines, and more importantly visitors to find what they should be finding.  No matter how careful you are in migrating, you're going to end up with some 404 page not found issues, so this is a majorly important step.

Contact sites that have links to old URL and request the links be updated.  Painful, yes, but worth it if you can get them to change.