Switching to another CMS with different permalink structure, how not to lose organic traffic and Google rankings? Urgent Please!
-
One of my customers is in online jewellery sales business and they are going to change their CMS; the problem is there is no co-relation between URL permalink structure of the current CMS and the new one. What should we do so that we don’t lose our current organic traffic (also Google rankings) coming from indexed URLs in Google due to permalink structure change ?
Typical example:
Current URL: http://www.abc.com/pirlanta-nedir,AR-3.html
The new URL is going to look like this: http://www.abc.com/tek-tas-pirlanta-ar-4.html
-
100% agree on the 301 redirect strategy. The best execution is to 301 redirect each page to the new page on the new site. If you have a TON of pages and can not create a 301 redirection rule for every single page you should at least 301 redirect the proper directories to each other.
One thought is...since you will be doing this 301 redirect why not make the NEW urls user/keyword friendly? Also maybe build some directory structure to the site. Hopefully you will be doing his but just thought I should mention it.
-
Okay great, thank you so much Jonathan
-
No, if you use 301 redirections, you don't have to correct the old pages.
It's says something like that : "Hey Google, doesn't care anymore about this page, this (the new one) is the page to care about. You can transfert PR,... from the old page to the new one"
-
Thanks Jonathan, I found this as a guideline for 301 redirection: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work
The thing is their website also have on page SEO errors such as duplicate page titles, duplicate content on different product pages etc. Shall we correct them all before moving to another URL structrure? Does that make any sense? Or building a correct on page SEO structure on the new CMS would be okay?
-
For me, you've no choice : you've to use 301 redirection from all your old url's to the new one
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
-
Google image search filter tabs and how to rank on them
I have noticed Google image search has included suggestion tabs (e.g,. design, nature... when searching background) on the top of the image search.
Technical SEO | | Mike555
Are there specific meta tags I can add into my images so that my images will show up on each tab?
Do those filters just show content based on image keywords or something else? IRme7gQ0 -
Recovering from a Google penalty
Hi there, So about 3.5 weeks ago I noticed my website (www.authenticstyle.co.uk) had gone from ranking in second place for our main key phrase "web design dorset" to totally dropping off the SERP's for that particular search phrase - it's literally no where to be seen. It seems that other pages of my website still rank, but the homepage. I then noticed that I had an unread alert in my Google Search Console account to say that a staging site we were hosting on a subdomain (the subdomain was domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk) had hacked content - it was a couple of PDF files with weird file names. The strange thing is we'd taken this staging site down a few weeks earlier, BUT one of my staff had left an A record set up in our Cloudflare account pointing to that staging server - they'd forgotten to remove it when removing the staging site. I then removed the A record, myself and submitted a reconsideration request on Google Search Console (which I still haven't received confirmation of) in the hope of everything sorting itself out. Since then I've also grabbed a Moz Pro account to try and dig a little deeper, but without any success. We have a few warnings for old 404's, some missing meta descs on some pages, and some backlinks that have accumulated over time that have hghish spam rating, but nothing major - nothing that would warrant a penalty as far as I can tell. From what I can make out, we've been issued a penalty on our homepage only, but I don't understand why we would get penalised for hacked content if that site domvs.authenticstyle.co.uk no longer existed (would it just be due to that erroneous A record we forgot to remove?). I contacted a few freelance SEO experts and one came back to me saying I'd done everything correctly and that I should see our site appearing again in a few days after submitting the reconsideration request. Its been 3 weeks and nothing. I'm at a huge loss as to how my site can recover from this. What would you recommend? I even tried getting our homepage to rank for a variation of "web design dorset", but it seems our homepage has been penalised for anything with "dorset" in the keyphrase. Any pointers would be HUGELY appreciated. Thanks in advance! Will
Technical SEO | | wsmith7270 -
Ranking
Hi, I am New Here in community.. My site Ranking Well in google But From Last two month its rank and traffic got down, i am worried about my site. and now when i created a new account on moz and check my site I saw there is a Spam Score: 5 /17 For my domain www.getmp3songspk.com I have Total indexed 1,132,913 url in google indexed Give Me Suggestion How can i remove bad links on my site. Seeking Help.
Technical SEO | | Getmp3songspk0 -
Why did I lose my Page 1 ranking for my main term?
My site is http://www.killthezombies.com. I have historically ranked on page 1 for the term "zombie games" up until the beginning of 2012, since my site was launched in 2008. Now I am not in the top 100 at all, since Panda. Over the last year, I've tried many things to answer and solve this problem. I've cleaned up onsite issues, and I've tried to be more active in link building since I historically allowed my users to build links organically. While I don't expect to rank #1, since many of my competitors have the term "zombie games" in their domain, and they are far more aggressive on backlink building than I am, I do not understand why my domain is not even in the top 100. It's clear I used to rank, and that Bing and DuckDuckGo still think KillTheZombies.com belongs on page 1. I have reached out to Google to see if I've been penalized, and they actually got back to me to say I have not been. Google Webmaster Tools shows no crawl issues or warnings. I have many #1 rankings for terms like "zombie killing games", "kill zombies", etc. Does Google now think my site is about "kill the zombies" and somehow not about "zombie games", which is clearly my subject matter and something I've optimized for?
Technical SEO | | webkrew-889150 -
Google Links
I am assuming that the list presented by Google Webmaster tools (TRAFFIC | Links To Your Site) is the one that will actually be used by Google for indexing ? There seem to be quite a few links that there that should not be there. ie Assumed NOFOLLOW links. Am I working under an incorrect assumption that all links in webmaster tools are actually followed ?
Technical SEO | | blinkybill0 -
I am Posting an article on my site and another site has asked to use the same article - Is this a duplicate content issue with google if i am the creator of the content and will it penalize our sites - or one more than the other??
I operate an ecommerce site for outdoor gear and was invited to guest post on a popular blog (not my site) for a trip i had been on. I wrote the aritcle for them and i also will post this same article on my website. Is this a dup content problem with google? and or the other site? Any Help. Also if i wanted to post this same article to 1 or 2 other blogs as long as they link back to me as the author of the article
Technical SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10 -
What's the best way to switch over to a new site with a different CMS?
Is it better to 301 or to closely duplicate each page URL when switching over to a new website from an established site with good ranking and a different CMS ( Drupal switching to Wordpress)?
Technical SEO | | OhYeahSteve0
