Site Rebuild -Larger to smaller

[OnlineAssetPartners]

Hi All,

We are rebuilding an existing site which has around 230 Pages (lots of content not required) down to around 20. Whats the best way to 301 redirect the pages that are going to be removed- (we wont be able to use .htaccess because we are moving to Adobe Business Catalyst)

Thoughts? We are trying to preserve as much SEO value as possible.....

[Christy-Correll]

Hi there, thanks for your question! You've received some excellent responses. Did any of them help you resolve your issue? We'd love a status update, thanks!

Christy

[customerparadigm.com]

Peter - no worries at all.  Beers on me next time you're in Boulder, Colorado...

[crackingmedia]

@Jeff - sorry was obviously writing my response when you had posted yours. Almost a snap!

Peter

[crackingmedia]

Hi

For pages that continue to exist obviously you need to redirect them to the new page URL.

For pages that you are removing, first off try to find the best match page to what they were about and redirect them.

For pages for which there is no obvious replacement, I will still redirect them anyway, but maybe to the home page of the site.

Google will re-crawl all new pages even when they match, to check content. In the context of a complete change of content for a page, very little if any SEO value will be retained but at least if someone is clicking an old link left on the web to a page which no longer exists they will be taken to a useful navigable page on your site.

Although you can no longer use .htaccess redirects, you can still do 301 redirects in Adobe Business Catalyst. Please see the documentation here: http://helpx.adobe.com/business-catalyst/partner/redirect-page-urls.html

I hope that helps,
Peter

[customerparadigm.com]

It appears that the Adobe Business Catalyst system does allow you to create 301 redirects through the admin system:
http://helpx.adobe.com/business-catalyst/partner/redirect-page-urls.html

… as well as be able to upload a .csv or .tab file to do a bulk listing.

I'd recommend 301 redirecting pages to a similar top-level category, so that the end user isn't confused when they arrive there.

That said, going from 230 pages to 20 is going to reduce the content of the site by 10x. I'd imagine that doing so is going to kill most of your SEO rankings. I'd just make sure to let the client know in writing that this is a pretty bad idea from an SEO rankings perspective.

We have a similar client that ranks extremely well for seminars and conferences, and their older conferences are still available on their site for people to reference. Some of them rank very well, even years later. The client wanted to remove these from their site, but we did some tracking and measurement and showed them that they were getting many new clients based on these older pages. As well as taking up spots on search results pages that their competition wouldn't get.

If there's one thing that Google likes, it's relevant content on a site. So I would make those 20 pages really count. Make the content extremely engaging to the end user. Watch the bounce count.

Hope this helps!

• Jeff