Safest way to launch a redesign
-
Hey MozFolk,
I was wondering what the best and SAFEST way to handle this situation is; I am doing a redesign of our current website, but the new site will have different content. Should we just forward the entire root domain in the HT Access file? Or redirect each and every URL using a 301? I know these, terms but never actually done it myself, and cannot risk losing the SEO weight of this website.
How do I handle a group of pages that they don't want to continue to use also? Do I just leave those URLs be, or do I forward all of them to one new page (or homepage) on the new site?
Please help me look like a rockstar and save the ship from sinking itself!
-
Hey thanks, the site is less than 30 pages. But would it be just as acceptable to just forward the entire domain, or is it better practice to 301 each individual page. And if I do 301 each page, do we ALSO need to forward the domain?
I appreciate your help!
Derek
-
It can be a pretty big job if you change the URL structures - depending on how large the website is.
Modesto Siotos wrote a blog on it here.
If you change the structure then ideally, you should forward every page to the closest replacement page on the new design using a 301.
Give the blog a good read, it should hopefully help.
Matt
-
How big is the site? It would be ideal to either keep the existing site structure so you don't need to worry about redirecting pages OR 301 as many pages as possible to the new URLs for those pages. If you have any pages on the current site that won't have a counterpart on the new site, then I recommend 301ing as many of those pages to the most relevant page on the new site as possible.
Of course, if your site is thousands or millions of pages large, then it's likely not feasible to manually go in and redirect every single page so I'd recommend at least redirecting the most popular pages to their new counterparts and then possibly redirect all of the remaining pages to the most relevant mid-level pages or even the homepage.
The last thing you want to do is simply redirect all of the pages to the root domain...
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
-
I'm looking for a bulk way to take off from the Google search results over 600 old and inexisting pages?
When I search on Google site:alexanders.co.nz still showing over 900 results. There are over 600 inexisting pages and the 404/410 errrors aren't not working. The only way that I can think to do that is doing manually on search console using the "Removing URLs" tool but is going to take ages. Any idea how I can take down all those zombie pages from the search results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexanders1 -
Site Redesign Performance
Hi, I am looking for a bit of advice if possible. In October 2018 we did a site redesign for a website that we had acquired (www.drainageonline.co.uk) but we have lost SO much organic traffic since Oct (-40/50% each month). I have amended any crawl errors including broken redirects ensuring all 301's that we put in place are working correctly, ensured 404 pages working OK, implemented canonical onto all pages along with other bits but we don't really seem to be seeing any improvements in our organic traffic. Can anyone offer any advice on the above? Thanks, Lea
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAP_Digital_Marketing0 -
Changing URL's During a Site Redesign
What are the effects of changing URL's during a site redesign following all of the important processes (ie: 301 redirects, reindexing in google, submitting a new sitemap) ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jennifer-garcia0 -
Can my affiliate subdomain hurt in any way?
Hello everyone, My main website is: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com Whereas the above site's related "affiliate" website is located on the subdomain below: http://affiliates.virtualsheetmusic.com I was wondering if having that "affiliate section" on a subdomain could affect the main website negatively in some way... or would be better to put it in a sub-folder on the main website, or even on a totally different domain. Thanks in advance for any advice!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Sitemaps during a migration - which is the best way of dealing with them?
Many SEOs I know simply upload the new sitemap once the new site is launched - some keep the old site's URLs on the new sitemap (for a while) to facilitate the migration - others upload both the old and the new website together, to support the migration. Which is the best way to proceed? Thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Is there a way to make Google realize/detect scraper content?
Good morning,Theory states that duplicated content reduces certain keywords’ position in Google. It also says that a web who copy content will be penalized. Furthermore, we have spam report tools and the scraper report to inform against these bad practices.In my case: the website, both, sells content to other sites and write and prepare its own content which is not in sale. However, other sites copy these last ones, publish them and Google do not penalize their position in results (not in organic results neither in Google news), even though they are reported using Google tools for that purpose.Could someone explain this to me? Is there a way to make Google realize/detect these bad practices?Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoseoseos0 -
Whats the best way to revive a directory that was 301'd and now I want to remove that?
Last year i 301'd one of my directories on my site, pointing everything to a different directory. Long story short I am going to sell this product line again and would like to just remove the 301 to that original directory, but I am reading that the 301s are also cached in most browsers for a long time. Has anyone successfully done this and if you did what was it that you had to do? Thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SandyEggo0 -
Hiding Text in an SEO friendly way - is it possible?
Hello, I have a client who has very little (practically no) text content on his ecommerce website, on the home page and category / sub cat pages. We have drafted some text for him - but the designer has fought back against this as he feels it will break the design. Our proposed solution is to have some text visible - and the rest will be text that is hidden but can be revealed by clicking Read More. We are planning to follow these recommendations : http://www.shimonsandler.com/collapsible-div-seo-friendly/ We are not hiding text for the sake of it - but more to improve the UX. We of course want the text to be accessible - i.e. readable by screen readers. Does anyone have any experience or opinions in respect to taking this course of action, and is there anything we should make sure we either do or not do to stay on the side of the BIG G? Kind Regs, Rich
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichBestSEO1
