Website Redesign / Switching CMS / .aspx and .html extensions question

[NielsB]

Hello everyone,

We're currently preparing a website redesign for one of our important websites. It is our most important website, having good rankings and a lot of visitors from Search Engines, so we want to be really careful with the redesign.

Our strategy is to keep as much in place as possible. At first, we are only changing the styling of the website, we will keep the content, the structure, and as much as URLs the same as possible.

However, we are switching from a custom build CMS system which created URLs like www.homepage.com/default-en.aspx  
No we would like to keep this URL the same , but our new CMS system does not support this kind of URLs.

The same with for instance the URL: www.homepage.com/products.html
We're not able to recreate this URL in our new CMS.

What would be the best strategy for SEO? Keep the URLs like this:
www.homepage.com/default-en
www.homepage.com/products

Or doesn't it really matter, since Google we view these as completely different URLs?

And, what would the impact of this changes in URLs be?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Best Regards,

Jorg

[NielsB]

Hello Jeff,

Thanks for your response as well! 
Like you said, I think we have to customize some things in our CMS system (Composite C1). 
I found some very helpfull documents which will help us with this.

With a few tweaks I hope we can leave everything the same during the migration and change things later in small steps.

Thanks a lot Jeff,

Regards,

Jorg

[NielsB]

Hello Peter,

Thanks for your response!
We can indeed set up 301 redirects, that should be fine. But like most SEO's would recommend, we would like to keep everything as much the same as possible.

We are currently looking for the options to adapt the new CMS systems that it lets us customize every URL on page level.

Thanks a lot!

Regards,

Jorg

[customerparadigm.com]

Jorg -

I do agree with Peter; you should absolutely use 301 redirects to redirect your old page names to the new ones.

I would try to keep some consistency for your URLs, if you could.

So if the page now is www.domain.com/about.html --> go with www.domain.com/about/

This will (a) make the 301 rewrites a lot easier to do, and (b) keep things a bit more simple for you.

That said, there are ways to keep the old page name extensions intact, but it depends on your server settings and how much access you have to modify things.

For example, you could have a page that appears to be:  about.html  ... and ends with the .html extension, but was really a php page.

Depending on the server, this is usually a quick thing to fix, although you'll need to update your content management system to work with this.

I'm a big fan of not changing the URLs if you don't need to.  You'll still do okay if you do a single 301 redirect, but more than a few hops and you'll start to loose value.

Hope this helps!
-- Jeff

[crackingmedia]

Hi Jorg

As the old site has URLs with .aspx I assume that was using a Windows server. Is the new site also on a Windows server.

I don't work on Windows server sites myself but I believe you can set up 301 redirects on your server using IIS.

For each old URL you would need to set up a 301 redirect to point it to the new URL. By doing that, bookmarked pages and links on the Internet to your site will resolve to the right page on the new site, plus search engines will also be redirected to the correct page and at the same time you will retain some but not all of any SEO value links to those pages are passing to your site.

I hope that helps,
Peter