Site relaunch and impact on SEO
-
I have some tough decisions to make about a web site I run. The site has seen around for 20 years (September 1995, to be precise, is the date listed against the domain). Over the years, the effort I've expanded on the site has come and gone, but I am about to throw a lot of time and effort back into it.
The majority of the content on the site is pretty dated, isn't tremendously useful to the audience (since it's pretty old) and the site design and URL architecture isn't particularly SEO-friendly.
In addition, I have a database of thousands vendors (for the specific industry this site serves). I don't know if it's a factor any more but 100% of the links there have been populated by the vendors themselves specifically requesting inclusion (through a form we expose on the site). When the request is approved, the vendor link shows up on the appropriate pages for location (state) and segment of the industry. Though the links are all "opt-in" from vendors (we've never one added or imported any ourselves), I am sure this all looks like a terrible link farm to Google! And some vendors have asked us to remove their link for that reason
One final (very important) point. We have a relationship with a nationwide brand and have four very specific pages related to that brand on our site. Those pages are essential - they are by far the most visited pages and drive virtually all our revenue. The pages were put together with SEO in mind and the look and feel is very different to the rest of the site. The result is, effectively, a site-within-a-site. I need to carefully protect the performance of these pages.
To put some rough numbers on this, the site had 475,000 page views over the last year, with about 320,000 of those being to these four pages (by the way, for the rest of the content "something happened" around May 20th of last year - traffic almost doubled overnight - even though there were no changes to our site).
We have a Facebook presence and have put a little effort into that recently (increasing fans from about 10,000 last August to nearly 24,000 today, with a net gain of about 2,500 per month currently). I don't have any sense of whether that is a meaningful resource in the big picture.
So, that's the background. I want to totally revamp the broader site - much improved design, intentional SEO decisions, far better, current and active content, active social media presence and so on. I am also moving from one CMS to another (the target CMS / Blog platform being WordPress).
Part of me wants to do the following:
- Come up with a better plan for SEO and basically just throw out the old stuff and start again, with the exception of the four vendor pages I mentioned
- Implement redirection of the old URLs to new content (301s)
- Just stop exposing the vendor pages (on the basis that many of the links are old/broken and I'm really not getting any benefit from them)
- Leave the four important pages exactly as they are (URL and content-wise)
I am happy to rebuild the content afresh because I have a new plan around that for which I have some confidence. But I have some important questions.
- If I go with the approach above, is there any value from the old content / URLs that is worth retaining?
- How sure can I be there is no indirect negative effect on the four important pages? I really need to protect those pages
- Is throwing away the vendor links simply all good - or could there be some hidden negative I need to know about (given many of the links are broken and go to crappy/small web sites, I'm hoping this is just a simple decision to make)
And one more uber-question. I want to take a performance baseline so that I can see where I started as I start making changes and measure performance over time. Beyond the obvious metrics like number of visitors, time per page, page views per visit, etc what metrics would be important to collect from the outset?
I am just at the start of this project and it is very important to me. Given the longevity of the site, I don't know if there is much worth retaining for that reason, even if the content changes radically. At a high level I'm trying to decide what questions I need to answer before I set off on this path.
Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Thanks.
-
The vendor links are an important factor for me (and potentially lost in this thread, which is broader in scope). For that reason I opened a separate thread specifically to drill down on that aspect:
http://moz.com/community/q/should-i-remove-all-vendor-links-link-farm-concerns
-
Monica,
Thank you so much for your response, which is greatly appreciated. As you might imagine, I have a few more questions.
Can I assume that when you indicate that the old URLs are worth retaining that use of 301 redirects falls into that? Or, instead, are you suggesting that I should actually retain the old URLs (no redirect)?
The content issue is a little more unclear to me. It is true that I get a small percentage (about 33%) from those other pages. But that still adds up to 150,000 page views. Not a ton of activity, admittedly, but also non-zero
My (tentative) conclusion at this point is to port the existing content as-is, but map to a better URL structure, redirecting the old URLs to the new ones (301). Then, as I start creating new, more valuable content (with completely new URLs) I will have pages that effectively supercede the older content, and I'd redirect the older URLs to the new ones. At that point I have new content and a new URL structure, so it's something of a phased approach but doesn't necessitate throwing away all my current content. Anyway, that approach is on my mind.
The SEO story around the vendor pages is not a good one
Here's how it works. Each vendor can submit their details through a form and select a topic and a location (state). Once approved, that vendor would show on a topic page and a separate location page. We don't have pages where we don't have data (so, if Nebraska doesn't have any vendors we don't artificially create an empty page) - but with thousands of vendors we still have thousands of pages. So, numerically, we are probably well over 50% of these "trash" vendor pages. So, we are presumably in the "world of trouble" right now
I have some questions related to these pages:
- Is there a particular metric or metrics that might "prove" that these pages are doing more damage than good? Does Moz expose anything that readily expresses a page like this being assessed poorly by Google?
- Given that I am almost certain that the pages are "toxic" (but would like to know for sure - see above), would I be best served by simply deleting them (this is easy to do) and then presumably redirect them to the home page since there will be no obvious replacement content. I basically want them gone!
- If I do delete them, over time would the "penalty" be repaired, in terms of SEO
I have a lot of questions, don't I
Seriously, this is really fascinating to me and I'm eager to understand this before I make any changes. In short, I need a plan.
Thanks again
-
Hi there,
After reading your post i would just like to say, I feel your pain. I have been working the past few months at helping a company out a similar situation. Scrapping a website and starting fresh could be very instrumental in your SEO success, but you have to ask yourself is it the overall best thing for my customers?
The first things I would like to point out (just a little unsolicited advice) is that perhaps moving to a completely new site might be the easiest and most efficient way to do this. You will be able to keep your domain and all of its domain authority while bringing your site into the 21st century. You want to give site structure just as much attention as site content. Is your site mobile friendly? If not, you want to move to a responsive design asap. Now, to answer your specific questions.
- If I go with the approach above, is there any value from the old content / URLs that is worth retaining? - The old URLs are worth retaining absolutely. There is a chance that all of the URLs drive traffic to the site, and you want to preserve that. As far as content goes, you seem to think only the content on your 4 "traffic driving" pages are actually driving traffic, so I would say scrap it. If your customers find no value in it, then there is no value to it. It is probably taking up good real estate on your site.
- How sure can I be there is no indirect negative effect on the four important pages? I really need to protect those pages - _There will be a little give and take when you redesign a site. You might see some ranking fluctuations, but if those pages are great performers now, chances are they will still be if you change nothing. I always believe when it comes to content,you have to keep what works, but also add freshness to it. That is why User Generated Content is so valuable! It lets you keep static, keyword targeting content while adding something uniquely valuable. While those pages are performing well now, chances are they will be outdated one day like the rest of your site's copy. _
- Is throwing away the vendor links simply all good - or could there be some hidden negative I need to know about (given many of the links are broken and go to crappy/small web sites, I'm hoping this is just a simple decision to make) - **I recommend you have someone do an indepth analysis of your link profile before you make any changes. Depending on how many links there are and whether or not you would have to disavow them, it could be extremely negative for your SEO. If these links make up 5% of your link profile, you shouldn't see a huge issue. If they make up 50% of your link profile you could end up in a world of trouble. The most important thing you can do for your link profile is build new links, and diversify your link profile. **
And one more uber-question. I want to take a performance baseline so that I can see where I started as I start making changes and measure performance over time. Beyond the obvious metrics like number of visitors, time per page, page views per visit, etc what metrics would be important to collect from the outset? - Heat mapping would be a great tool for you to use. The click trails will give you great in page metrics. GA offers this for free, and Moz offers HotSpot with a Pro membership. I always measure the following things:
- Organic CTR
- Search Impressions
- Percentage of increase/decrease in clicks
- Percentage of increase/decrease in New Sessions
- Bounce Rate
- Organic conversion rate
- Decrease in PPC spend
- _Increase/Decrease in Phone calls - I measure this because it is one of our Key Performance Indicators. _
I hope that you will get lots of good answers to your questions! These are my professional opinions based on experiences I have had with older websites. Good luck to you!
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
-
SEO Effect of inserting No indexed Contents in normal Pages (Nextgen Gallery)
Hello Dear Community, I'm running a photography website and have a question about the indexability of "No indexed Content" inserted on indexable pages. Background : I read everywhere that best practice is to "no index" all useless pages with few content, what I did with Yoast plugin : I no indexed all my nextgen galleries and "ngg_tags" since they create single pages for every photo, tags or slideshow. I did the same for all my porfolio-posts, price lists, testimonials and so on... Nevertheless, I inserted these galleries and portfolios on SEO optimized page for my target keywords. + Nextgen plugin automatically adds these images in the page sitemap. My idea is to have only my Seo optimized page showing in Google and not the others. Problem: I've been checking the results in Google Search Console, filtering by images : I discovered that most of the images featured in these Masonry galleries are not showing in google, and actually almost all the images indexed are the Wordpress from media gallery. I double checked with Screaming Frog, and the software doesn"t see images on these pages. My question is: Is the low indexablilty of these contents are related to the No indexation of the original contents ??? Does somebody has experienced the same issue that these contents doesn't show on Google ? in advance many thanks for your help
Reporting & Analytics | | TristanAventure0 -
PDF web traffic hitting our site
Hi there, Over the last few months our traffic has spiked due to irrelevant pdf documents sending us crap traffic, our bounce rate is sky high as well as other metrics. I don't want to just filter out this traffic in GA rather try and stop our site from being attacked. Any advice on a way forward would be great. Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | ICMPmarketing0 -
Is it possible to set up one of the Goal Conversions on Google Analytics for a different site?
We are in the process of a website migration and need to set up the conversions for the new site. What is the most effective way of doing this?
Reporting & Analytics | | Sable_Group0 -
Stop getting info from Google analytics on purchases in our site
Hi guys, We have eCommerce.
Reporting & Analytics | | WayneRooney
We connected the site to the Google analytic eCommerce.
Everything was work fine until 3 weeks ago. Suddenly we stooped getting purchases information in the analytic although i see purchases in the website. We didn't change anything in the website and i really don't know how to solve this problem.
If someone here can point me where i can get some info on how to fix it it can be great. Thanks a lot!0 -
Large event site - how should I structure my URLs?
Hi guys, I'm working on a new website which is consolidating a number of existing event sites into one. The existing sites use a variety of URL structures: www.eventsite1.com/events/event-name www.eventsite2.com/festival-program/event-name www.eventsite3.com/event-name This inconsistency has led to issues with tracking category usage properly in analytics - for instance, with eventsite3.com, events fall within categories (www.eventsite3.com/category-name) but as soon as you drill into an event detail page (www.eventsite3.com/event-name) from the category page, the category is lost to analytics. This is compounded when one event lives within multiple categories, as I can't figure out which category is the most effective for a particular event. I've seen other event sites establish a canonical URL for a primary category, display it in the URL (i.e. www.eventsite4.com/primary-category/event-name) yet still let that event get hit via the secondary categories (www.eventsite4.com/secondary-category/event-name). This way, the categories get passed to analytics without any duplicate content issues (i.e. via the setting of canonicals) Basically, I want to make sure that whatever instruction I give to the devs for the new site re: URL structure is correct from an SEO perspective and analytics perspective. Do I even need to worry about having the category in the URL? Can someone please help me with this? Hope this makes sense Cheers
Reporting & Analytics | | cos20300 -
Mobile Site on Google Analytics
Hi mozzers, We just launched a mobile site and I was wondering what are the main steps to follow for gettting your mobile site tracked via GA (m.example.com)? We have a profile for www.example.com GATC: javascript or PHP to install? Should the profile be on a subdomain? What else to consider when implementing a mobile site on GA? Thanks
Reporting & Analytics | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
What extra shall we do to increase organic traffic for both the sites?
One of my clients has english language websites targeted for USA and UK audience with some content variations but60%-70% of the content on site remains the same. The site is hosted in USA. One is hosted on brandname.co.uk and one is on brandname.com. The precuations that we have already taken to save it from being marked duplicates are: 1. used rel=alternate element for all product detail pages2. currency in both the sites are different that is GBP and USD3. have tried to differenttate the product by using different product specific terms like Publishing Year: vis a vis published in:Author Vis a vis Written byFormat vis a vis binding type Add to cart vis a vis add to basket and so on What remains the same: 1. Title structure 2. Description 3. Product Name 4. About the product text
Reporting & Analytics | | CyrilWilson0 -
Yahoo wont Index my site...???
For some reason every time I get an SEO report card, or even check for my site on Yahoo, im never there. An the Report card always tells me that I am not being indexed by Yahoo. I don't understand bc my site is indexed by Google and Bing beautifully. I feel like I am missing out on good potential traffic...Any suggestions?
Reporting & Analytics | | Caseman0