What are SEO factors in re-doing a website?
-
Most of my work now involves converting older websites to CMS-based sites (in Wordpress) and I'm wondering about best practices here.
If I create a "dev" or "sandbox" directory for my development work how do I keep the pages from being indexed while I am working on the new site? Can I "noindex" a directory?
What do I do with the old html files when the new site goes live? I'm assuming I will do a 301 redirect from domain.com/index.html to the new domain.com/, and also on all of the inner pages that have equivalent pages in the new site. But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them?
-
Sorry. I just noticed that my link in my earlier response was broken.
Here is the correct links http://bit.ly/feg8co
-
Thanks. It looks like an excellent resource!
Bill
-
Thanks for your response.
In this case I am not changing the domain name, but converting the site from html/css to Wordpress. Many of the url names will stay the same, but they won't be .html files anymore.
-
Make sure you follow the steps as listed on https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en.
Proper 301 direction, new sitemap upload, change of address notification and retaining your old domain for atleast a year will make your transitions smooth.
-
_But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them? _
If any of the old pages left benind have" Page Rank" ascribed to them, you might consider creating "catch all" pages on the new site so as to be able to 301 the leftover old to the new "catch all" pages and thereby reatain the link juice.
This requires creativity as you don't want to lose usability just to catch more link juice. Not knowing your exact situation I'm not positive this is an option but mention it just incase.
-
There are tons of other issues to think about - I would suggest to make a research on that topix on that blog http://yoast.com/cat/seo/ - there you will find answers to several issues you should think about.
-
Ooops I meant plugin - Wordpress Plugin
@SEOmoz - maybe an edit feature would come in handy - the same as available in the blog comments!?
-
Thank you Thomas,
I don't quite understand what you mean by "use a Wordpress login to do a quick and dirty redirect"
Bill
-
Hi Bill,
In your new CMS, you can use this meta tag until you are ready to launch:
In regard to the old pages, 301 them to either the home page or the most relevant subpages. If there are MANY subpages, you can use a Wordpress login to do a quick and dirty redirect of all the URLs that don't occur in the CMS.
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
-
Wordpress SEO for ecommerce store
I have been working on a wordpress ecommerce website and want to check that I am doing something correctly so hope someone can help. The Wordpress theme did not allow for an introductory content so the developer built a content page Instead to work as a front end category page so there was more flexibility. I have set the product categories to follow- no index and set the content page as the canonical version and optimised the content page.. question is - is that the right thing to do?
Technical SEO | | musthavemarketing0 -
Images on Website for SEO
Good Morning, We have a magento website with hundreds of different products that have slight size variations. The image for each of these products looks the same (the only difference between the products is some of the dimensions) .... Would you recommend using the same image for each of these products and just use a generic file name that describes the overall product or would you give each product its own image with it's specific product name as the file name? Should I use 1 image for 500 different sku's or should i rename the file the name of each individual sku and load an individual image? The end user will not know the difference since all of the images will appear identical, simply asking from an SEO perspective. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Prime850 -
Personalization software and SEO
Hi guys, I'm just testing a personalization software in our website, basically changing the "location" text depending on the user's IP. I can see in my software that when the Google bot comes to our site the personalization software triggers an action changing the location based text to "California". Can this make Google understand that our website targets only users in California and thereof hurt our rankings in other locations nationwide? I'll appreciate your opinions.
Technical SEO | | anagentile1 -
Am I doing SEO test properly?
Hello, I just created a page for researching the impact of social signals on Google ranking (in Italy). Page was not optimized (one internal backlink, no other external/internal links, keyword repeated 4 or 5 + h1 h2, no alt tags), and only social signals are being stimulated (through votes). The domain is 2 months old and is already positioned for few relevant keywords, but from 2 page down. My question is: am I doing right? Is this a good way to proceed? And if not, what I should do instead? Thank you for an advice. Eugenio
Technical SEO | | socialengaged0 -
Multi Company websites
Hello SEO community ! Hope you'll have some good advice for this project. 🙂 I'm working for a group of companies just starting its SEO experience. Nowadays they have 10 different websites with different names and pretty much the same objectives. So basicly, > Would it be better to gather all website under one adress with subdomains ? They want to display almost the same info, blogs and products.. It make dupplicate content a real pain and Social Media strategy a nightmare. More info: 10 websites for 8 subsidiaries, 1 holding, 1 online shop Each subisdiary has english + its proper language They want regular posts and info updates (blogs, newsletters) They don't have all the same name They all do the same activity Online shop is full a product keywords Ideas: Working on the holding website as mother ship - for branding (social media), actu (blogs), CM (videos, and more)- Displaying the online shop products in all websites (xml) Diplaying blog updates (no full message) via xml on all websites Linking all websites to the blog, shop and holding Tks a lot !
Technical SEO | | AymanH0 -
I have 2 websites with the same content
Hello everyone, this is my first post here on SEOmoz and I have a questions that I cannot seem to figure out. So here is my scenario: I have 2 websites that are identical. The only difference between the 2 websites is the domain name. This was done a while back for marketing purposes, however, I am no longer needing my 2nd website. What is the best way to get rid of this second website? I still have about 1 paying customer a day convert on this 2nd website and I do not want to loose them, however, I know that I am getting penalized by the search engines because of this duplicate content. Please let me know the best way of going about this. PS: I have read about 301 redirects, canonicalizing URLs, and other methods but do not know which one to choose. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | threebiz0 -
Does running 2 domains from the same website harm my seo efforts?
Hi I run a website which has 2 domains running from it. One domain has a .co.uk extension and shows products aimed at the UK market. The other domain is a .com which shows products aimed at the US market. As both domains run from the same website, the content is mostly identical APART from the product listings as they change depending upon whether you're in the UK or US. My reason for doing is this mainly for paid search purposes as I can have a more accurate domain depending upon which country I target. Both sites are set to encourage the bots to index it, and in google WMT each domain is targeted to its specific country. So, my questions are, Is this set-up possibly damaging my SEO efforts for either or both websites? If so, would setting one domain to no-index, improve SEO efforts for the other? Thanks in advance for any replies! Cheers Joe
Technical SEO | | joeprice0 -
Hosting in the US for an Australian website
Hi, I was wondering whether it's still important for SEO to host a website in the same country as you're targetting. We host a fair few Australian sites and we're looking for a new webhost at the moment. Should we only consider hosting on Australian servers or is it worth looking at servers elsewhere? One of the main reasons we're thinking about US hosting is that we can get a machine that is 3x more powerful than we can get in Australia for the price. This performance increase should go some way to minimizing the effect of the latency increase. Thanks, Nick
Technical SEO | | MarketingResults0