How to keep old URL Juice During Site Switch
-
I am switching a local businesses website to a new template. The url structure will be different. What is the best way to not loose the old urls and what content should I serve on them?
For example:
The url oldwebsite.com/product-a will no longer exist when I switch to the new template. I dont want to loose the current page rank and associate seo juice. At the same time, I do not have the resources to remap every page to the correct new page. My initial thoughts are to just display the homepage content on all of the old urls. Is this a good practice?
-
Hi Michael,
Thanks man that means a lot!
All the best,
Thomas
-
PS this will help too
If you buy http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
This free guide from Seer Interactive is better than the one that comes with it
Screaming Frog Guide to Doing Almost Anything: 55+ Ways of Looking at a Tool
http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide
as Jeff stated Microsoft Excel can be one of the best tools in the world for you right now here's some info/Tools
http://www.distilled.net/excel-for-seo/
http://seogadget.com/tools/link-categorisation-tool-for-excel/
http://seogadget.com/tools/anchor-text-tool/
http://www.johnfdoherty.com/three-phenomenal-excel-spreadsheets-for-link-analysis/
http://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/awesome-examples-of-how-to-use-seotools-for-excel/
-
I know this is not a domain migration however it should be treated almost exactly like one
I can if you change tell you from personal experience on quite a few jobs the link structure of a website Google long with redesigning it meaning put it on a CMS like WordPress not that WordPress is that I love it however the links are knocking to be the same. Meaning let's say you had 40 links on example.com/example.php now you will have a URL example.com/example/ or example.com/keyword-example/ only if appropriate
now you have a new website that are looking, more user-friendly, the URLs are easy to understand because of the way the written. You would think I should be better ranking.
Unfortunately the gods that Google will not allow that every time. If you do not map the 301 redirects correctly your site will lose an immense amount of traffic in fact I would say don't make the change and less you can take the time to create new 301 redirects. That point to whatever the new version of that pages is and it must be done correctly with the right amount of time.
Make sure to tell Google that you're making a change
thumbs up to Jeff He has told you exactly the way you should conduct the 301 redirects and how important they are.
Please read the URLs below as well.
What Robert says in this link is right on the money and the URLs below are regarding the SEOmoz.org to Moz.com transition while I understand that's not a cheap or quick transition it does have a very effective method for not losing value when making changes like you are doing.
Please read these 3 links
http://moz.com/community/q/changing-domains-how-much-link-juice-is-lost-with-301-redirect
http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons
Although Robert does post this URL I think it should be posted again it's about telling Google what you're doing ahead of time
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en
http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic
if don't know the photograph I attached is big enough however here is a link to it that is large enough and I will link to the author is Aleyda Solis it is her page to give credit where it's due.
this is full-size info-graph about what will affect the domain during a immigration
http://www.aleydasolis.com/images/seo-website-domain-migration.gif
You said You are doing this for local SEO the same woman who made the photo in the link above Aleyda Solis a local SCO expert these are some other things you should be concentrating on
http://www.aleydasolis.com/seo-local-google-places/
You will want to do a complete audit of your website before you move so you're not losing links. That means to me at least using majesticSEO, aRefs & Moz OSE
I love Moz however if you want to utilize all 3 of those tools and you're on a budget you might want to try Raven's tools & SERPS free 30 day trial out it allows you information from all 3 sources. Though I do prefer Moz
once you have done this use a free tool for up to 500 pages http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/
this will audit allow for you to make 301 redirects and map your site if you pay for the Pro version which is about €100. Well worth the money though.
Last but not least. When you make this transition you are going to need to possibly change from Apache to Nginx I'm basing this on Nginx being close to the 2nd most popular Web server in the world right now. Here are two tools that will you to drop in your Apache code and convert it to Nginx code you take what was in the .htaccess file and dropped the converted code into the Nginx config file all of these tools are excellent however the 1st one is probably the most proven that and the 3rd one lets you see both code changes made simultaneously So you can and right in Apache and watch it come out and Nginx in real time all 3 work your choice.
I hope this helps and I think everyone here has put some good information About this in here.
Best of luck to,
Thomas
-
I agree with Federico. If you don't do 301 redirects for the older pages --> mapped to the new pages, the site's rankings will likely drop like a stone. Especially if you have inbound links pointing to those older pages. Google will figure out from the new site structure what pages should be indexed. But best practice is to map the older pages to the new ones.
Depending on the site, you should be able to automate some of this, and plug it into an excel spreadsheet to come up with the 301 redirects for the .htaccess file.
If for example, the older URLs are all like: http://www.domain.com/about-us.html and the new site is http://www.domain.com/about-us/ then it's easy to create this rule and apply it more systematically (using a programmatic rule in the .htaccess file), or just plug all of the pages into a spreadsheet and have this apply:
Redirect 301 about-us.html http://www.domain.com/about-us/
You are now much later in the game, but when we are working on a new site layout that changes the URL structure, we will often map this out (page by page) early on, so that we don't miss any of the older pages on the site. And in some cases, we've made a lot of effort to keep the existing site structure, as older pages that have ranked well for 10+ years might be better left alone, without a name change.
That's my $0.02, though… I think that 301 redirects are often overlooked in the website design budget, but if you want to make sure that your client is happy 3-4 weeks from now and refers more business to you, this is a must-do item, in my professional opinion. That said, it's not fun to go over budget on a project
-
Hi,
As Fedrico mentioned the best and perhaps the only right way to do it is to redirect all old pages to corresponding new pages.
However please make sure you do a 301 redirect.
I understand that you may have time limitations owing to which you not want to redirect each url to corresponding page but if you could share some technical information about your website, I can help you speed up the process by providing dynamic 301 redirect codes which can take care of a lot of manual work on your part.
Please share the following information on my private message:
1. Website URL/s (new if its already live and old too)
2. Do you use a CMS system? If yes please mention if it's wordpress / Joomla or any other?
Thanks & Regards,
Prateek Chandra
-
I believe not. That won't be a good solution.
The best one I can suggest is you DO redirect all the old pages to the new version of them (if any) and the other ones, the ones that have no new match you should return a customized 404 perhaps with links to related pages you can have within the new design.
It will take time, yes. But that's the way to keep the most of your search traffic and pagerank.
Hope that helps.
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
-
Our site recently switched from http to https. Do I still need to setup a redirect for the incoming links pointing to http?
Our site recently switched from http to https. If you type in the http://www.websitename.com then it will automatically go to https://www.websitename.com ... my question is... do I still need to create a redirect in the htaccess file to ensure we don't lose all the links currently pointing to the http version of the website?
Technical SEO | | ninel_P0 -
Site Navigation
Hello, I have some questions about best practices with site navigation & internal linking. I'm currently assisting aplossoftware.com with its navigation. The site has about 200 pages total. They currently have a very sparse header with a lot of links in the footer. The three most important keywords they want to rank for are nonprofit accounting software, church accounting software and file 990 online. 1. What are your thoughts about including a drop down menu in the header for the different products? (they have 3 main products). This would allow us to include a few more links in the header and give more real estate to include full keywords in anchor text. 2. They have a good blog with content that gets regularly updated. Currently it's linked in the footer and gets a tiny amount of visits. What are your thoughts about including it as a link in the header instead? 3. What are best practices with using (or not using) no follow with site navigation and footer links? How about with links to social media pages like Facebook/Twitter? Any other thoughts/ideas about the site navigation for this site (www.aplossoftware.com) would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | stageagent0 -
Should I make a new URL just so it can include a target keyword, then 301 redirect the old URL?
This is for an ecommerce site, and the company I'm working with has started selling a new line of products they want to promote.Should I make a new URL just so it can include a target keyword, then 301 redirect the old URL? One of my concerns is losing a little bit of link value from redirecting. Thank you for reading!
Technical SEO | | DA20130 -
I noticed all my SEOed sites are getting attacked constantly by viruses. I do wordpress sites. Does anyone have a good recommendation to protect my clients sites? thanks
We have tried all different kinds of security plugins but none seem to work long term.
Technical SEO | | Carla_Dawson0 -
Shutting down a site, where do I 301 it?
I'm working with a few international sites that we are going to collapse into one main site. Our current plan is to 301 the 4 other sites into our main site home page. Is this ok? Is there a better way to do this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0 -
Duplicate content with same URL?
SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on: http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL. Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl? Thanks for any help. Mike
Technical SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
New URL or Folder Off Existing Site
I am working on a project that is promoting dining in a particular region of the southwest for a destination marketing company. The parent Web site is an authority in the region and ranks well for almost all terms related to the leisure experience in the region. A completely separate Web site was built to promote this culinary program as it involves a committee of different stakeholders, but it’s solely focused on the region. My question is this. The site is on a different CMS, etc., but the overall experience on the site is similar to the parent DMO site in terms of creative. The client has a brand new domain that they purchased for this initiative, but we are also considering mapping the parent site URL to the new culinary site. Parent: www.regionalsite.com New Themed Site: www.regionalsite.com/theme/ Or www.themeurl.com My fear is that if I take the approach of the new URL that it will take forever for the site to build any link clout at all, as the client doesn’t really get the fact that working a link strategy is so critical. However, I know that having links from the regional site over to the theme URL will have an impact. Also, if I do take the approach of mapping the URL to a new folder off of the parent domain, do I risk that 2<sup>nd</sup> tier links on the micro-site will have a challenge indexing as they will essentially be on tier 3? Any advice would be appreciated.
Technical SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Link Juice passing through a redirect of a disallowed URL
Hey guys! Suppose I disallow search bots from indexing anything on my secure server in my robots.txt, and 301 redirect all of my secure server traffic to my non-secure site. Will the search bots see the redirect before they realize that they're disallowed from accessing that page? Or will they see that page is disallowed and not follow the redirect? Should I change my robots.txt to allow search bots to crawl my secure site so they can find the redirects?
Technical SEO | | john4math0