Major URL changes in new site launch
-
Hey Guys - we recently launched a new website for a client. Prior, all of their URLs were dynamic via an old-school Cold Fusion CMS. We basically had to rewrite 90% of the sites URLs (site is like 300 pages). The new URLs are SEO friendly and the on-page SEO is strong; but the page rank/authority is starting from scratch from these pages and placement has decreased more most of the new pages with competitive keywords.
We set up all of the 301 redirects properly and are actively monitoring in Google Webmaster Tools. **Anything else I can do to lessen the pain and get these pages higher page rank/authority sooner rather than later?**Thanks for all of your help.
-
It's not uncommon to see some lower traffic as Google re-crawls the site. If your 301 redirects are all done correctly to the correct pages, there's not much else you can do. As James mentioned, you may want to reach out where appropriate and see if you can have the link directed to the new URL.
I don't know how much they've changed, but you will also want to check and make sure that any changes to the internal links or navigation are for the best. Deeper pages can sometimes suffer in site redesigns if the number of internal links or the click-depth has fallen.
-
A few things to think about.
1. I usually crawl the old site with screaming frog software, to build by URL list.
2. I map out the URLs to related new pages on the site, any thing non related just 301 too the home page or sub category section.
3. Track your top converting keywords from the old site before and after the move too note changes.
4. Another too look at is internal links to your site from external sites, if you have some highly authority links it could be worth changing them to new URLS.
5. Re crawl the site after the launch to look for any errors pages ect, I wouldn't personally USE GWT for something like this I would use Deep Crawl or Screaming Frog.
-
One more - did you update the on page content to reflect the new URL structure? Any content linking to old URLs?
-
When did you launch the new site? For all 300 old pages did you redirect to the 300 new pages or did you just redirect everything to the home page? On those redirects, did you redirect to the same/equivalent page on the new site or different pages? Are the new URLs cached in Google SERPs or do you see the old URLs? Are you still seeing old URLs in your GWT reports for impressions and clicks? Did you update your sitemap with new URLs? Are you sure you got all the old pages? Often CMSs will generate all kinds of versions of a URL using parameters and so you will need your 301s to account for that.
Not sure if that is an answer, but I am just curious.
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
-
How do you influence the default site title?
Hi, We have noticed that on brand searches, a site's page title is replaced with the name of the site or the business, we can understand that this is due to the fact that a CTR enticing title is not as important when the customer is looking for a certain brand. What tells Google what company name to display in this instance? We're having trouble with our French site displaying the page title, we are moving the position of the title code earlier in the page, but can't see why a) Telefleurs is not displaying the title chosen and b) why it is displaying EuroFlorist when our French brand is Telefleurs. Any advice on this would be much appreciated! Thanks, Sam JgLwnGV.png
Web Design | | seoeuroflorist0 -
URL & Link Hierarchy - juice flow direction from backlinks?
Our site is very regional, so we focus all of our seo efforts on each of these region landing pages. For Example: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco We added an informational page (ex. reviews) and gave it a url like this: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco/reviews Question: Will external backlinks to domain.com/toys/.../reviews provide any link juice value to it's hierarchical parent page: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco?
Web Design | | 42Floors0 -
New Website launch, asking for feedback
Hey Guys, I just launched my new website. I just asking around for feedback. Please check it out if you have time and let me know www.benjaminmarc.com
Web Design | | benjaminmarcinc1 -
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Changing Page Extenstions
Hi all, I have a 10 year old website done in Classic ASP, which is fast becoming outdated and we are going to convert it to PHP so all of our pages would be changed from a '/page.asp' extension to a '/page.php' extension. I am familiar with the need to setup 301 redirects for this and I understand there will probably be a short term drop in our Google rankings. Naturally, I don't want to have to go through this again in the future so here is my question. Is having NO page extension, like '/aboutus/history' the wave of the future? Does having no page extension effect SEO at all? I have seen more websites using this technique in 2013 goes on so I am thinking this is the way we should plan our site update. I haven't looked into how to actually do this yet, but it would seem to make sense to me so that if we needed to change from PHP to say .NET or something else later on, we would not have to do 301 redirects again or have another drop in our rankings. Do any of you have an opinion or experience with this?
Web Design | | jacksghost0 -
Are URL suffixes ignored by Google? Or is this duplicate content?
Example URLs: www.example.com/great-article-on-dog-hygiene.html www.example.com/great-article-on-dog-hygiene.rt-article.html My IT dept. tells me the second instance of this article would be ignored by Google, but I've found a couple of instances in which Google did index the 'rt-article.html' version of the page. To be fair, I've only found a couple out of MANY. Is it an issue? Thanks, Trisha
Web Design | | lzhao0 -
Changing from All-in-One SEO to Yoast SEO
I am currently using, and have always used the All-in-One SEO plugin for my website, but I have have heard time and again that the Yoast SEO plugin is superior. How do I transfer to this plugin instead? Do I need to deactivate the all in one seo plugin? What happens to all the tags that are already there for the thousands of pages, including the main page, that is functioning from the all in one SEO plugin?
Web Design | | dtlalaw0 -
Footer backlinks for sites I've developed
I link back to my website via my company name on the footers of sites I develop. Lately I've been changing this to my keyword and mixing and matching. This has been done for new sites I create and old sites I've not seen any benefit so far after a couple of months. Most my clients are hosted on the same server as my main site that it links back to. 1. Is this a bad idea to link back on the same IP?
Web Design | | sanchez1960
2. Is footer backlinks to the main developer going to annoy Google?
3. Should I change my main site's server, will it help? All my competitors seem to do it and as far as I can tell they seem to get better results than I do. Because I'm now changing them the reason I see no benefit? Thanks0