Bad site migration - what to do!

[McTaggart]

Hi Mozzers - I'm just looking at a site which has been damaged by a very poor site migration.

Basically, the old URLs were 301'd to a page on the new website (not a 404) telling everyone the page no longer existed.

They did not 301 old pages to equivalent new pages. So I just checked Google WMT and saw 1,000 crawl errors - basically the old URLs.

This migration was done back in February, since when traffic to the website has never recovered. Should I fix this now? Is it worth implementing the correct 301s now, after such a timelapse?

[McTaggart]

Thanks for advice Paul - I've edited pages with poor backlink profiles out of redirect and 301'd the rest to relevant pages within the new website, and traffic has spiked up a bit. There were some very powerful links (national newspapers, etc) the new site was missing out on.

[ThompsonPaul]

Gonna have to disagree with Rob a bit here on one point. Definitely agree that it's still worth implementing the correct 301 redirects. However, by only doing it for page already getting traffic or having links, you're going to miss out on potentially a substantial amount of future traffic, especially long-tail (which is very valuable).

There can be many pages which Google has indexes and which can return for search results even though the pages don't have incoming links. To my mind, it would be a shame to throw away that traffic. It is possible to collect a list of all the pages of your site Google has in it's index, but its often easier to just correctly redirect them all. Often groups of pages can be redirected using a single redirect to  reduce the amount of work involved.

At the very least, make certain you have implemented an effective 404 page, and also ensure you have included your Google Analytics tracking code on the 404 page. Then you can use a combination of Analytics and Webmaster Tools to catch any incoming 404s and get them redirected immediately.

Does that make sense?

Paul

[McTaggart]

Thanks SErOb - good advice!

[SErOb]

At this point, I'd only adjust 301's for  the pages actual users are trying to access and pages with good backlinks.

Google will always have a record of the old pages in WMT, don't fret over that.