Changing design for a client. SEO concerns.
-
Hi there!
A client requested me to change the look of his website entirely. It currently ranks #16 on Google with one of their main keywords.
My problem is:
The current site was made in a CMS I'm not familiar with and all of its pages urls are not SEO friendly (EX: http://www.mysite.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=49&Itemid=95).
It is the first time I have come up with this situation so I would appreciate any tips or links to useful information. I tried searching in SEOmoz and came up with nothing. I'm sure this is a common problem though.
Since they want a static website, for starters their page extensions will change from .php to .html I'm not 100% sure but I think this will be a problem for their current ranking in Google.
Any ideas?
Edit: I forgot to mention that all of the backlinks this site has points to their hompage as www.mysite.com, I guess this is good.
-
Thanks a lot for your response Dave. I'm now confident thanks to the responses on what should I do to solve my issue.
-
Eblan, 301 redirects are the way to go.
Be aware that when doing 301 redirects you might temporarily lose rankings (if the internal pages rank), but in your case I would expect not only a quick recovery, but a rankings improvement due to a better URL format.
-
I know it doesn't sound very good but they only have 10 backlinks, and I doubt they are paid.
It seems the previous designer used a template, I am not familiar with the CMS they are using. It's not Drupal, Joomla or Wordpress (I forgot the name but has a sun in the logo).
I will follow your advice on the 301 redirects for sure and erasing the extensions using .htaccess.
Thanks a lot for your response!
-
What is the type of CMS? Sometimes small sites that are manageable and not constantly updated are easier just to handle as html pages. Drupal for instance is a nightmare for a layman to work on and overkill for a small site.
You should be able to make SEO friendly URLs in the CMS without changing the CMS though. I would look into that first.
Don't add the html extension you don't need it. All the old URLs should 301 to the new URLs. Also the CMS might be able to handle that or you can do it in .htaccess. It should cause no drop in rankings.
It's actually not really good that all of the pages are linking to the homepage, but it's OK as long as they aren't paid links. You should look at the backlink profile.
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
-
Alt tag for SEO
What’s are best rules around alt tag images for tagging? is this still relevant for SEO purposes
Web Design | | aplnzoctober180 -
Migration from HTML to Wordpress - SEO Implications?
I am in the process of having a wordpress site developed to replace my current HTML site. (I currently have my website in html and a blog in wordpress in a sub directory). I am doing this in phases to try and preserve as much of my good rankings as possible. My first phase is to replicate my site with the exact same pages, meta data, and site structure. I'm hoping that google will see this as not much change and not change my rankings for the worse. I also made it a goal that my site speed tests be at least equal to what they are now. We will have to 301 all of the URLs however since it will be going from /example.html to /example. I believe my blog will also need to move into the root directory as well, so I need to 301 all of those pages. I plan to wait a couple months for Phase 2. Phase 2 involves replacing old content (photo galleries), and introducing new content (virtual tours, videos, new pages, etc.) One of my reasons for moving to wordpress is to keep up with current trends a little easier since I have very little time. (I am owner, website maintainer, SEO - all on my own). My question here is three parts. 1. Do you think this strategy will work to preserve my current rankings? 2. Do you have any lessons learned or advice to share with me to make this as smooth as possible? 3. Do I really need to wait to add new content? I might get antsy and want to do it sooner! 🙂 Thank you in advance!
Web Design | | CalicoKitty20001 -
Analytics year to year comparisons when Url extensions change?
We manage a website which we recently changed from Drupal to Word Press. In the change, we dropped a small part of the previous URLs - the end extension - .php For example /attractions-rates.php is now
Web Design | | Teamzig
/attractions-rates with no .php. We eliminated the .php to make the URL simpler. How is it possible (and easiest) to do a year to year comparison as Google sees the pages as different? They didn't for the first 8 days (we could see both) but now the pages with the .php extension shows zeros. The content of the page is exactly the same only the .php is different. We know we can manually go back to last year's reports and do side by side but that is time consuming. Hoping there is a filter or process we can use to gen a report? Thanks, Jim0 -
Help, site traffic has dropped significantly since we changed from http to https
Heya, so I am just in charge of the content on the site, and the SEO content, not the actual back-end stuff. A little under 2 weeks ago we switched to https, and our site traffic has been down a lot ever since. When I SERP check our keywords, they don't seem to have dropped in rankings pages. Here is what I got when I asked our dev guy if 301 redirects were put in: I did not add any redirects so all of the content is accessible on both unless individual links get hardcoded one way or the other. The only thing in place is a Cloudflare plugin which rewrites links in cached pages to match the way its accessed, so if for example you access a page over https you don’t get the version cached with a bunch of http links since that will throw up mixed content warnings in the browser. Other than that WP mostly generates all its links to match whatever protocol you are accessing the current page with. We can make specific pages redirect one way or the other in the future if we want to though... As a startup, site traffic is a metric we track to gouge progress, and so I really need to get to the bottom of if it was the change from http to https that has causes the drop, and if so, what can we do about it? Also, in case it is relevant: the bounce rate is now sky high (ave. 15% to 64% this last week!) Any help is very welcome! Site: https://mobileday.com Thank you!
Web Design | | MobileDay1 -
Does an age verification home page hurt SEO?
There's a microbrewery in our area that just launched its first website. It has the "verify your age" homepage (which is not really their homepage, but I don't know what it's called) before you can enter. It looks like this: http://angrychairbrewing.com/ Anyway, does this hurt them at all from a rankings standpoint? Also, assuming bots/spiders/ROGER can crawl sites like this, (which I think they would have to be able to do) how do they get around this verification? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
How about some SEO tips for small local businesses
The amount of time I hear people say write good content and people will naturally link to you. I appreciate this must be valid for large websites that a driven by content. However, it doesn't really hold much hope for smaller businesses with just service information etc. I work for a small business that does web design in the UK. However, I'm finding it difficult to do any sort of link building. In my opinion nobody is going to link to any of our content naturally or if it is, its going to be small time. Our rankings have dropped slightly (only to 4th in our local county). I've done the following thinks to try get it back up there but its having little or no results. Adding us to local business directories External Articles on site Cleaned up some duplicate title tags. What link building can I do? Is link building the home page sometimes not always the way to go? What content can I write that google will like? See what I mean? My rankings did climb a little bit but then dropped straight back down to their original places 2 weeks later. Help would be appreciated.
Web Design | | sanchez19600 -
Does changing nameservers and a new site design affect SEO dramatically
We are about to change nameservers and upload a new website design design, completely rebuilt website to that new hosting, will this effect our seo efforts previously and have an effect on our SEO rankings?
Web Design | | CompleteOffice0 -
Need an SEO pro to build us a new fine art website
Hey Seomoz friends My friends and I started buying and selling art 5 years ago. We did it all on ebay. Two years ago I decided to try an attempt at building us a website to further our business outside of ebay. www.originalartbroker.com I used homestead.com software aka intuit to do this. I was able to get a lot of first page results in seo after a ton of work and willing to do a lot more. I'm sure the homestead site slowed my efforts down. I need more power 🙂 What we do. We sell fine art. We are trying to aspire to the leading seller of fine contemporary art online. We will do whatever it takes to get there. Our issue is not our product. Our issue is getting traffic to the site. I only have 175-200 visitors a day. I need better results for the keywords of our artists and inquires that surround them. We have a bounce rate of 70%, average time on site of 1 minute 50 seconds, and a slow loading site that is almost impossible to create individual pages for pieces (mgmt nightmare) Outside of our site we have blogs, squidoo pages, facebook account with 2500 fans, twitter page with 2k followers, youtube channel, and a blog on the site for new arrivals. We have a 200-250 piece on our site at any given time. We add probably ten pieces on average a week. We don't need any kind of ecommerce management software as most of our sales are done over the phone being that it is higher end art. I need a site that out performs my competition. I need to be in the top three when someone types in "leroy neiman" "peter max" and so on. I, with limited knowledge, need to be able to use the software everyday to upload new art as it comes in. I want every piece to have its own page so that I can also add pieces to a google merchant account. When I add new pieces under a certain artists and it creates its own page i want it to create h tags and an url extension for each product as I add them based off the discription and artists name. I would like some sort of blog integration to post our new arrivals as we get them. I would like some sort of customer capture. I am thinking something along the lines of them prociding email, name, and zip code to see the prices on the site. You are the seo pro so you know what it takes. I would like to know what a solution would cost to get us on the ground with more seo power. A site with speed that is easily indexed. It doesn't need to have a lot of bells and whistles. Please look at my site and let me know what you think. You can get an idea from that of what we are doing. Please give me an idea of what you can do and what it would cost. Thank you
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments0