301 redirect or maual edit of new urls
-
Hello forum!
I will get right to the point,I have a 4 year old PR4 site with lots of links (vacation rentals marketplace, like Homeaway),
In about a month from now new CMS will be ready and I will be doing redesign of the site.
The problem that I have is (as many of you can guess) losing all the old links that rank high = losing traffic / revenue.
Two posiblle solutions here:
1. 301 redirect for each page that ranks high - point it to new url
2. Manually editing new urls created by new CMS and making them to be the same as old ones. This means that some number of urls (the ones that rank high and generate traffic) would be exactly the same while other ones would be generated by CMS thus dufferent in many ways (unicode,different keywords etc.)
What would You do here?
I am more for 301 redirect but I read all kinds of horror stories in drop of SERP.
Thank You for help and advices in advance.
-
Thank You for your advice.
There is no need for change but the change is not avoidable,with new CMS we will have 22 languages + unicode characters in urls + different url structure.
If I choose to keep some of the old urls (edit new ones maually so they are the same as old ones) and for the rest of the site I let the CMS create new ones, what do You think would I have a problem with Google?
The url difference is what I am concerned about,do search engines follow some url logic when indexing a site?
To explain it better:
I have city listing url
- the old one that is ranking high has following url: domain.com/keyword/city-name
-the new ones are having : domain.com/country/city-name/keyword
If I decide to keep the old one for serbian language for example and let the CMS create new urls for other languages,would that be ok in terms of SEO?
-
I see.
In my opinion, and from my previous experience, I would say to keep the exact same URLs as the old site. If there is no specific need for new URLs (which it doesn't seem is the case) then don't change them.
Keep the same structure as the current site along with the URLs and you will see the best results. Creating new URLs then redirecting to them is only going to cause problems.
Hope this helps.
Matt.
-
Hello Matthew,
Thank You for your answer.
My old urls are not dynamic,they are well optimized with keywords and phrazes.
If You for example search "Apartmani Sutomore" my site is ranking no.1.That specific one and lots of other urls are generating a lot of traffic and its a big risk for me to lose them with upcoming season.
Not sure what to do here to tell You the truth.
All the best
Dusan
-
Hi Dusan,
I have worked on a number of projects such as this and I am actually working on a CMS migration at the moment. For this specific client we have decided to keep all of the URLs the same because they were all relevant and were ranking well in the search results.
The decision that you have to make here could be based heavily on the current state of the existing site. If your current URLs have been created very ineffectively, i.e. they are all dynamic URLs and have no keyword relevance to the page content then there may be a case for going down the 301 redirect option. What I would say is that if you go down the route of 301 redirects you WILL see drops in the SERPs.
By creating a 301 redirect to a new URL on the site you are essentially halving the PageRank going to the page from what was going to the old URL. This new URL will also need to be indexed by the search engines and if it isn't done fairly quickly then you are going to see some traffic drops.
If you let me know the URL of your existing site then I will take a quick look at it and let you know the potential risks, etc.
Matt.
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 Deindexing Site, but Reindexing 301 Redirected Version
A bit of a strange one, a client's .com site has recently been losing rankings on a daily basis, but traffic has barely budged. After some investigation, I found that the .co.uk domain (which has been 301 redirected for some years) has recently been indexed by Google. According to Ahrefs the .co.uk domain started gaining some rankings in early September, which has increased daily. All of these rankings are effectively being stolen from the .com site (but due to the 301 redirect, the site loses no traffic), so as one keyword disappears from the .com's ranking, it reappears on the .co.uk's ranking report. Even searching for the brand name now brings up the .co.uk version of the domain whereas less than a week ago the brand name brought up the .com domain. The redirects are all working fine. There's no instance of any URLs on the site or in the sitemaps leading to the .co.uk domain. The .co.uk domain does not have any backlinks except for a single results page on ask.com. The site hasn't recently had any design or development done, the last changes being made in June. Has anyone encountered this before? I'm not entirely sure how or why Google would start indexing 301'd URLs after several years of not indexing these.
Technical SEO | | lyuda550 -
OSE says URL redirects to URL with trailing slash but it doesn't.
Site is www.example.com/folder/us and OSE says this URL redirects to www.example.com/folder/us/, but it does not. When I look at the OSE report for the latter version with the "/" it says "No Data Available For This URL". Why would that be? The original URL is www.example.com and it redirects to www.example.com/folder/us. Is this anything I need to worry about? I thought that the trailing / doesn't really mean much anymore but nonetheless, why does it think it redirects there?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Can I Get Penalized for 301 Redirects (Too Many or In Any Scenario)?
A client of ours owns several domain names that are keyword similar to the domain they actually use to run their site. They are asking us if we should 301 redirect all of these websites to the domain they use. However, I don't want this to work against them and their site get penalized later for this. I have heard buying out competitors and redirecting their domain to yours is frowned upon and penalized when you get caught (they did not do this). We are also wondering if there is a limit as to how many domains you can 301 redirect and what type (keyword similar, misspellings, .net's, etc.) and if you are penalized after too many (i.e. >50). All of the domains in question are keyword/brand name similar only and do not exist as actual websites. We just want to do the right thing. Thank you for your help.
Technical SEO | | JCunningham0 -
301 redirects tanked our site on google - what now?
We had several hundred old pages on the site with duplicate content and new pages with fresh info on the same topics. So I redirected the old pages to the new pages. Next day, plop, we're dumped off google for almost every keyword. Dang I thought they didn't want duplicate content and old funky pages. What did I do wrong and what can I do to fix it? Thanks so much for anyone who can share their expertise. Jean
Technical SEO | | JeanYates0 -
301 redirect domain to page on another domain
Hi, If I wanted to do a 301 permanent redirect on a domain to a page on another domain will this cause any problems? Lets say I have 4 domains (all indexed with content), I decide to create a new domain with 4 pages, one for each domain. I copy the content from the old domains to the relevant page on the new domain and set it live. At the same time as setting the new site live I do a 301 permanent redirect on the 4 domains to the relevant pages on the new domain. What happens if Google indexes the new site before visiting the redirected domains, could this cause a duplicate content penalty? Cheers
Technical SEO | | activitysuper0 -
Can I do a redirect to a new domain name only a couple of weeks after having redirected to another domain?
I have a client with two website with very similar content. Both had a lot of inbound links and performed fairly well in SERPS. We recently combined both sites and have redirected one of the domains to the other. The traffic dipped slightly initially, but is recovering nicely. Now the client registered a new domain name he would like to use for the site. Should I wait a few weeks for everything to settle down after the first redirect/consolidation of sites before doing a new redirect to a new domain name, or should I not worry about having any issues with doing it right away?
Technical SEO | | Drewco0 -
301 redirecting some pages directly, and the rest to a single page
I've read through the Redirect guide here already but can't get this down in my .htaccess I want to redirect some pages specifically (/contactinfo.html to the new /contact.php) And I want all other pages (not all have equivalent pages on the new site) to redirect to my new (index.php) homepage. How can I set it up so that some specific pages redirect directly, and all others go to one page? I already have the specific oldpage.html -> newpage.php redirects in place, just need to figure out the broad one for everything else.
Technical SEO | | RyanWhitney150 -
301 Redirect "wildcard" question
I have been looking at the SEOmoz redirect guide for some advice but I can't seem to find the answer : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection I have lots of URLs from a previous version of a site that look like the following: sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=2d&page=1 sitename.com/-c-25.html?sort=3a&page=1 etc etc. I want to write a redirect so whenever a URL with the terms "-c-25.html" is requested it redirects to a specified page, regardless of what comes after the question mark. These URLs were created by our previous ecommerce software. The 'c' is for category, and each page of the cateogry created a different URL. I want to do these so I can rediect all of these URLs to the appropraite new cateogry page in a single redirect. Thanks for any help.
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0