Removing a lot of content & changing url structure.

[PedroAndJobu]

I recently moved an existing ecommerce site, which I recently purchased, from Volusion to Shopify.

The new site has a completely different link structure.  The old site also had about 120 products which are not even close to being up to par with the products I now have on the site.  So I had to remove all of those pages too.

I was just wondering which measures I need to take to deal with this?

I created a really nice 404 page.  I also 301 redirected the pages which still exist.  But I was wondering if there is anything else I should do?

Should I request a removal of all the old pages, which no longer exist?  Should I do something else I'm not thinking about?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

jim

[irvingw]

you could 301 everything to the closest similar product page/url instead of 404ing if these are entry pages that were ranking and getting traffic in search. by 404'ing them you'll lose those rankings, 301ing them will keep that ranking position but show the new URL in it's place.it all depend on if they were getting landing page traffic or not. also if any links are pointing to those pages and if they have any PR i would 301 them all instead of throwing the page juice away.

what could you be forgetting?

update sitemap.xml files and take the old ones off of the server and resubmit in Google

internal linking is all updated, sometimes people have blogs pointing to old URLs, if you're 404'ing then you need to update them, if you're 301'ing they can be left the way they are if it will be time consuming

make sure your robots.txt is updated, and people a lot of times put their sitemap.xml paths in the robots.txt so that would need to be updated

run a broken link checker on the site once done

[BenRWoodard]

I would be good to set up Site Search tracking and monitor the searches that are taking place.  Depending on the results it might be a good idea to create a "You were looking for 'this product' but 'this product' or "this product" might be a good fit." page.

Also, make sure to check back through the links to the site and try to reach out to the websites in regards to changing the link URL.  Watch GWT closely over the next few months.