Will changing content managment systems affect rankings?
-
We're considering changing our content management system. This would probably change our url structure (keep root domain name, but specific product pages and what not would have different full urls). Will our rankings be affected if we use different urls for current pages? I know we can do 401 redirects, but anything else I should consider?
Thanks,
Dan
-
Thank you very much.
-
Thanks for the response. My main concern was the loss of rankings. I thought the change in URL's may negatively affect rankings.
-
When you move to a new CMS there could be changes in your.....
-- page URLs
-- title tags
-- onpage optimization markup
-- persistent navigation
-- anchor text on persistent navigation links
-- category, page, tag, etc treatment
-- other changes
If you are planning to move to a new CMS your goal should be to kick your SEO up a notch instead of worrying if you are going to lose something. If you are in fear of loss then that is the call for more study or to have a professional CMS and SEO expert review your plans for moving the site or even do the move for you. The price might not be as high as you think.
Don't move your site thinking that you are taking a risk. Move your site with a plan if upping your game.
-
Hi Dan,
Changing your content management system is among the most common processes to affect search visibility. However, there are definitely ways to change your CMS while minimizing the chance of losing ranking. 301 redirects need to be used to change your old URLs to new ones, while top referring link sources should be analyzed and perhaps contacted for notification of the new URL, so your inbound links won’t be affected. Pages which cannot be mapped need custom 404 error pages, preferably with a user-friendly message to let visitors know the status of the page. Once your new CMS system is in place, make sure you pay close attention to your analytics for broken links and 404 errors so these can be dealt with immediately. Keeping all this in mind, and referring to TopRank’s blog post for further understanding, will help keep your rankings secure while you update your website.
-
I think you mean 301 redirects. The best way to not lose any rankings at all is making sure each URL has a 301 redirect to the new URL. Otherwise, all your links will just return an error.
Usually this is the best way to ensure link juice is being passed to your new URLs. It is tedious but needs to be done.
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
-
Is it cloaking/hiding text if textual content is no longer accessible for mobile visitors on responsive webpages?
My company is implementing a responsive design for our website to better serve our mobile customers. However, when I reviewed the wireframes of the work our development company is doing, it became clear to me that, for many of our pages, large parts of the textual content on the page, and most of our sidebar links, would no longer be accessible to a visitor using a mobile device. The content will still be indexable, but hidden from users using media queries. There would be no access point for a user to view much of the content on the page that's making it rank. This is not my understanding of best practices around responsive design. My interpretation of Google's guidelines on responsive design is that all of the content is served to both users and search engines, but displayed in a more accessible way to a user depending on their mobile device. For example, Wikipedia pages have introductory content, but hide most of the detailed info in tabs. All of the information is still there and accessible to a user...but you don't have to scroll through as much to get to what you want. To me, what our development company is proposing fits the definition of cloaking and/or hiding text and links - we'd be making available different content to search engines than users, and it seems to me that there's considerable risk to their interpretation of responsive design. I'm wondering what other people in the Moz community think about this - and whether anyone out there has any experience to share about inaccessable content on responsive webpages, and the SEO impact of this. Thank you!
Web Design | | mmewdell0 -
My site build in HTML has been badly hit this recent update and I have been toying on the idea of changing it to Wordpress
My site build in HTML has been badly hit this recent update and I have been toying on the idea of changing it to Wordpress. Would this help in my rankings? It seems the hit came only that last 2-4 days when business become much quieter. Frankly i have no idea on why the site fell in ranking all of a sudden. Been comparing to competitors and even a friend in the same industry and nothing makes sense so far (link profile, DA, PA etc) This site has been ranking well for 3 years prior to this. 2. My site has loads of content and visitors arrive from various landpages. But by changing it wordpress, the url of most of them would probably change. What should i do? 301 redirect all of them or is there a better method?
Web Design | | rester0 -
Do pull quotes affect SEO positively or negatively?
I like the design element of a pull quote to ad interest and highlight an important point. If I use an exact quote from the page in a pull quote on that page, does that negatively affect SEO as duplicate content? Are there formatting or tagging methods that could help pull quotes to boost SEO? For clarity, by "pull quote" I mean a stylized bit of text that floats on a page in such a way that the body text wraps around it. It is actual text (not text embedded in a graphic) but it behaves like an image with text wrapping around it. Here's an example (in red on the right side): http://www.21ct.com/resources/news-room/21ct-announces-its-latest-us-patent-for-advancing-big-data-security/
Web Design | | kyle21ct0 -
Will upgrading my dedicated server improve my site speed
hi, at the moment i am concerned about my site speed for www.in2town.co.uk My hosting company is tmd hosting and my package is Intel Atom 330 1MB L2 Cache 1.6GH $159/mo $189/month500GBStorage4GBRAM10TBBandwidthi am looking at increasing this to**$219/mo** $289/month500GBStorage6GBRAM10TBBandwidthcan anyone let me know if this will make a difference to my site speed please
Web Design | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Duplicate content and blog/twitter feeds
Hi Mozzers, I have a question... I'm planning to add a blog summary/twitter feed throughout my website (onto every main content page) and then started worrying about duplicate content. What is best practice here? Let me know - thanks, Luke PS. I sat down and re: blog feed... thought that perhaps it would help if I fed different blog posts through to different pages (which I could then edit so I could add<a></a> text different from that in blog). Not sure about twitter.
Web Design | | McTaggart1 -
How long will the 301 ranking swap-over take?
Hi all, I'm about to hit the crunch button and finalise the 301 setup for our website to redirect all traffic, and our old very nice ranking, to our new website. My only question is, how long will the ranking take to move to the new site? Once the 301 is in place what happens when someone searches my keywords? Currently when you search our preferred keywords we rank 1 and 2 depending on the wording. Once I've made the 301 happen, will you see the old site in Google rankings until they re-index it or will it swap straight away to the new site with its continued high rank (from the link juice) or will I have a blackspot period where I don't rank at all? I cannot afford to have a period of time, at this time of year, that I don't rank 1 or 2 - if this is even a vague possibility I might have to consider postponing my 301 till a less important time of year. Thanks for your help, Anthony
Web Design | | Grenadi0 -
Real Estate and Duplicate Content
Currently we use an MLS which is an iFrame of property listings. We plan to pay an extra fee and have the crawlable version. But one problem is that many real estate firms have access to the same data, which makes our content duplicate of theirs. Is there any way around this ? Thanks
Web Design | | SGMan0 -
Best way to handle related content links in a sidebar?
My site contains tens of thousands of articles, studies, multimedia files, biographies, etc. To assist users with finding content that might be related to the page they're on, I use a side bar with 'also of interest' links to other, similar content on my site. This is, of course, pretty standard practice. Search engines -- Google in particular -- index these pages and then include the text in the sidebar links in search results. So, for example, on a given page I may have 20 links to related content, and the text in those links might be, 'A story about subject ABC.' When I search for 'A story about subject ABC,' Google returns not only the page titled (and containing the content) 'A story about subject ABC.' but also every page that links to it and happens to have that link text in the sidebar. What is the proper way to handle this kind of thing?
Web Design | | smorrison0