New folder structure

[NeilTompkins]

We are in the process of relaunching one of our website's that will use a totally need folder structure.

Previously we used mydomain.com/content/country/region/city/district/hotel_name/

Now we are changing to make the URL shorter, more precise - since we are using a new CMS, to be mydomain.com/gb_Hotel-Name/

My question is currently we've in the region of 10,000 pages indexed in Google.  So we are going to have to create 301 permanent redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs.

From your previous experience, is this the correct way of approaching the task.

[ASOS]

Hi Neil.

The sites we have done are all new but from experience dealing with moving to new urls the best thing to do is create a mapping document in excel. It'squite easy if you know that for example:

www.domain.com/berlin-hotel is moving to www.domain.com/de/berlin-hotel.

Then all you need to do is put in the 301s based on the mapping and monitor WMT for issues - you will always miss something.

From what you are saying however there is no logical structure to your site - which will make this harder. I have had to deal with this in the past too, you might just need to identify all of the more important pages and 301 these first and go via mechanical turk of get an intern in or something to just plough away and find all of your urls.

If you have an XML sitemap you should be able to get them all pretty quickly and map from here.

Hope this helps.

[NeilTompkins]

Hi ASR, can you advise more on how you moved to the new folder structure ?  Did you leave old pages in place, launch new site, then go through all old URLs and 301 them to the new URL ?

The problem I have is the new folder structure is not a standard pattern, so any 301 will need to be done manually.

[AlanMosley]

either way, it would not hurt to 301 all.

[ASOS]

Ooops, should have said link juice.

As you can all see Alan and I have different views on this but at least you have a range of views Tommo!

Good luck - hope it all goes well.

[AlanMosley]

"A 301 will pass 80% of the page authority over."

No a 301 will pass 85% of its incomming link juice, you are redireceting the inomming links not the page

A 301, passes 85% of its PR from the page to another page though a link from the page.
But if the page no longer exists it can not. Once you delete that page, it no longer has any page rank, but the pages that may link to the old page are still passing PR, so in that case you can redirect those links to the new page. But you cannot redirect the non existing page or any authority it had to the new page.
Read Google’s algorithm, I assure that is not how it works.
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html
By the way, all links pass 85% of link juice it has though its links, if the link hits a 301 redirect, it loses 15% again. This is so you don’t get infinite loops.
Imagine if you could move a page and somehow gets its PR by doing a 301 redirect. You could keep moving it and it would keep getting more PR.
If I could use an analogy
If you have a store and Bob has a store, and Bob closes down, but puts a sign on his door telling his customers to go to your store, you will get his customers, but you don’t get his stock. And if he had no customers you get nothing.
Anyhow if you read the link you will see that I am correct

[ASOS]

A 301 will pass 80% of the page authority over. You also don't leave any 404s.

I'm not sure why you are so against 301s? It's tidier, "best practice" and not hard to do. Why risk missing something out that might prove the difference?

[AlanMosley]

They will reindex them, you dont need to 301 then to get them reindexed.

But they dont have any page rank if the no longer exist. you can only pass link juice though a link, if the page no longer exists then you can not link from it, and there is no link juce juice to pass.

If that were true, you could keep moving a page and its link juice would keep rising.

[mjtaylor]

I would 301 all the pages; it's "best practice," IMO.. The old pages had juice just from the fact that they existed; ie. inbound links aren't the only value you want to preserve. And, as ASR points out, best to avoid the 404s. The redirects are not just for the PageRank, but to allow search engines to easily reindex the content.

[AlanMosley]

"The pages will still have some authority even without links"

they would if they were still there, but they no longer are, its just a ref to them in the index,

sure if they have some like or links, I agree

If they are in another lingo, they maybe, I dont know, but if they are in the same lingo, I still say they will be duplicate content

[ASOS]

The pages will still have some authority even without links, so I would definitely pass any little bit there. Social signals too if there are any that might not have been picked up. And I would also worry that while some tools say there are no links, I don't know one 100% reliable tool to tell you page X has no links.

If the local sites are in DE, FR, ES, or whatever, then they are not duplicate, they are local language. IBM, Apple to name a couple certainly do this route also.

Matt Cutts may say that, but we certainly do not suffer from this problem in the least. Another Cutts "we do this but really don't" comment maybe?!

[AlanMosley]

I agree it would of worked, but if they had no incomming links, then it was un-necessary.

[AlanMosley]

Why must you 301 it, if they have no in comming links. There is no link juice to keep.

As for theTLD's, if they are duplicate content websites, which I assume they are, then you will have duplicate content problems. How will you get around that?

If yopu listen to the Matt Cutts video again, he says at the beginging, if the are all on the same TLD you will be pinged for DC

[ASOS]

Disagree with you on that one Alan. We have no issue with duplicate content and it is also what everyone (including those at MOZcon this year) recommend.

In fact I have an email from SEOMoz themselves recommending it.

TLD will get better over time but from experience running 7 sites (6 country sites) I would only ever use folders now.

I also disagree with your comments below about not 301ing all old content. You must do this when re-launching.

[AlanMosley]

I have to disagree, using the TLD's you dont need to worry about duplicate content.

See Matt Cutts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ets7nHOV1Yo

[ASOS]

You are having to link build to multiple sites, they are start from zero in a search engines eyes (no matter how strong your current site is), your marketing materials cannont just mention domain.com etc.

Our use of folders with our strong domain strength has seen them launch and a month later be at the top of local search engines for hard to rank for search terms.

I cannot recommend strongly enough that going down the folder route is much better for SEO.

[NeilTompkins]

Yes, the other .de site for example will be 100% in the local language.  What pitfalls do you feel we will have if we went the route of many TLD sites ?

[ASOS]

Yes that is what I am saying. Definitely head down the domain.com/country-folder ie domain.com/uk

This has a lot of advantages around marketing, all of the links to this one domain help strengthen the entire site instead of having to having to link building to a number of new sites (which are starting from scratch in Google's eyes).

And you can still target them in GWMT by country too - which will definitely work. I am presuming they will be in local language as well?

Hope this helps.

A

[NeilTompkins]

Currently our domain is domain.com.

But we were thinking about having domain.de, domain.com.cn, domain.es etc.  Are you saying this isn't the way to go ?  We were looking to host these sites in the TLD country e.g domain.de hosted in Germany.

Examples where this has worked very well is TripAdvisor.

[ASOS]

Okay. That makes sense but I would stick to one TLD if you could as you can run with folders and all of the country country sites (in the folder) will inherit all of the your one TLD strenght, makes things like link building easier too.

I would strongly recommend this. We have 6 international sites now and three are TLD (before I got here) and three folders and all of the folder sites are doing so much better than the TLD - the difference is amazing.

Even if you go with the new TLD I would miss out the GD_ bit - you don't need that at all if you have a TLD and makes no sense to me. I would rather have domain.com/city-hotels/hotel-name and optimise around this. You can then have landing pages around city hotels ie berlin hotels and pull in traffic this way.

Just a thought!

[NeilTompkins]

For the new site we will be having international TLD like mydomain.de.  Re the GB this is so we initially know what country the hotel is located in, and in some instances hotels have the same name, but in different countries.

[ASOS]

I would 301 all of the pages - to relevant new pages otherwise you will end up with a heap of 404s too if the old content just disappears. Blogs etc will have linked to them etc, you want to make the US as good as possible.

Mapping out the 301s will take time but be worth it in the long run.

I have done a website with 500,000 pages and mapped it and it worked well.

A

[AlanMosley]

i would only bother 301 redirecting those that had incomming links or you will have a mess on your hands.

If you take a short cut and try to 301 on mass to the one page, bing for one will just ignore them as far as link juice goes.

also up untill recenly Matt Cutts said that _ or - were a matter of choice, but now he has stated to use -, cant remember the reason.

After 301ing all pages with in-links, i would just go to google and and remove site (enter root domain). This way yopu get rid of all the old pages and aviod duplicate content.

Others will proabaly not agree. but this is how i do it. Block the site with robots.txt, then remove site in GWMT by entering the domain name in remove url.
Wait a day till its removed, then remove robots.txt block.

dont woory, you need to leave a block in place for 90 days to really remove from index. doing this all the pages that still exist will be back in a few days, the rest that 404 will be removed from index.

[ASOS]

Hi Tommo.

Sounds like the clean up is a great idea. I wonder if you still need the GB at all? Is this for language or country? If you are doing country/language I would have a folder for each ie

domain/en/us/title-of-hotel

You can then geo-target these to country specific areas in GWMT as well - which would be helpful.

And definitely 301 them all - this is a must.

A

[SuperlativB]

Yes this is correct, the 301 redirect will forward all juice to the new structure and Google will find this change pretty fast.

If you have a sitemap you could also submit that map to google through webmaster tools, that would update the index faster. Good luck!