How to keep old URL Juice During Site Switch

[bloomnation]

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?

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Michael,

Thanks man that means a lot!

All the best,

Thomas

[BlueprintMarketing]

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/

[BlueprintMarketing]

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.

http://winginx.com/htaccess

http://labs.gidix.de/nginx/

http://www.anilcetin.com/

I hope this helps and I think everyone here has put some good information About this in here.

Best of luck to,

Thomas

LfTUEjO.gif

[customerparadigm.com]

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

[Prateek_Chandra]

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

http://www.bizezee.com

[FedeEinhorn]

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.