Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
-
Hello Community,
What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss?
Thanks
-
Thank you all. 301 is definitely the plan. As Andy pointed out - to "predict" how Google will react to the change even with a comprehensive 301 effort is a miss and hit exercise.
-
As Andy/Steve were pointing out--the key is to as many redirects as possible (ideally all of them). On a large enterprise website this is extremely tedious and resource intensive and most people fall in the trap of just redirecting all pages that had more than x amount of visits in the last year. Unfortunately, the majority of your traffic is the long tail traffic that may be under this threshold and traffics drops after migration.
As for Organic rankings, there is a small decay factor using 301's.
-
Hi,
As I understand it you'll need to map all the old URLs to the New URLs with a set of 301 redirects.
This will tell google that the old page has permanently moved to the new location. You should get all the rank juice but I think you may loose a little.
Hope that helps
Steve
EDIT - I was writing my response while Andy was posting his...
-
The first thing to remember is to point all old pages to the new ones using 301's. Am I right in thinking that the basic content for each page will stay the same? If so, that is quite straight forward.
If you are removing pages altogether, then try to find the best matches for a redirect. Doing this should minimize any loss.
As to what Google will think, that is a little awkward to second guess. Sometimes there are no issues and the site will just carry on, other times you may see a drop or rise in the SERP's. No easy way to determine this.
Andy
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
-
Organic search traffic is dropping since September
We own a large wiki site which allows people to make articles about their business and other things that Wikipedia would prohibit. To make our site more rich and expand the pages people can link to on their pages, we scraped between 1-2 million pages from the english wikipedia, pages such as “Los Angeles, CA” and “United States” etc. We’ve been getting a steady supply of organic backlinks from users who create their own pages and cite their wikis on their website, in news etc. However, starting 2 months ago our organic traffic has started slowly decaying as if we have received some kind of algorithmic penalty. What could it be? Could it be dupe content from the wikipedia pages we imported and indexed? Could it be some kind of algo from the Penguin update? We are just very confused why our organic search traffic would begin to drop at all since every day we have organic users making quality pages, some of whom organically backlink their articles on their own website and these obviously add up over time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teddef1 -
How to avoid adult traffic to site?
A client of ours is increasingly getting a lot of adult traffic to their site, where they show up only for adult searches and not at all for relevant searches. How can we stop Google associating their site with adult content? Here's a blog example, giving advice to parents on girls and body image issues: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/girls-and-body-image keywords driving traffic to this page are all around images for 'young nude girls' etc.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MediaCause0 -
Keywords Ranking Varies When Search changes Location/City (Not Google Places)
We have a client that are ranking well on most Australian cities for competitive keywords except Google Sydney. If you toggled the cities on the search field when you search for a keyword, their places are almost exactly the same except for Sydney on which they can't be found at all in the Top 100 results. The keywords are not city specific, they are general commonly searched keywords about health. This is not a Google Places issue. The search result shows the right landing pages of the site for their respective keywords. Any ideas or experience on this kind of situation. Much appreciated Louie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | louieramos0 -
How do I best handle a minor URL change?
My company is about to complete an upgrade to our website but part of this will be changing the URLs slightly. Mainly the .aspx suffix will be dropped off the pages that we're most worried about. The current URLs will automatically redirect to the new pages, will this be enough or will there be an SEO impact? If it helps the site is www.duracard.com and the product pages are the ones we want to keep ranked. For instance if someone searches for "plastic gift cards" our page '<cite>https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards.aspx</cite>' is #3 and we want to make sure it stays that way once we change it to 'https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards'. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrea.G0 -
How Do I Generate a Sitemap for a Large Wordpress Site?
Hello Everyone! I am working with a Wordpress site that is in Google news (i.e. everyday we have about 30 new URLs to add to our sitemap) The site has years of articles, resulting in about 200,000 pages on the site. Our strategy so far has been use a sitemap plugin that only generates the last few months of posts, however we want to improve our SEO and submit all the URLs in our site to search engines. The issue is the plugins we've looked at generate the sitemap on-the-fly. i.e. when you request the sitemap, the plugin then dynamically generates the sitemap. Our site is so large that even a single request for our sitemap.xml ties up tons of server resources and takes an extremely long time to generate the sitemap (if the page doesn't time out in the process). Does anyone have a solution? Thanks, Aaron
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alloydigital0 -
How can this site rank post panda/penguin?
I am doing link building for an adult dating comparison website. One of the main competitors though, having checked their backlink profile have anchor text that is not varied at all. In fact many, many links that are all the same. How can they possibly rank in the post panda/penguin era? In fact they're at number 2! The site is an adult site and it www.f hypen buddy.co.uk if anyone wants to runa backlink check on OSE. Any help greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Most efficient way to change site structure?
I would like to change my sites structure to be more efficient for SEO. I have a fear that the changes will have a potential impact on my current rankings, but know this would be a good long term decision. My site is wordpress, so the changes are relatively easy to make. What are some ways to change the site structure without damaging your rank? I would have to have to clean up a bunch of errors, so is the best way to simply do 301 redirects on the old pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dignan990 -
What are the different tactics for getting ranked/ included in Google finance searches such as http://www.google.com/finance/company_news?q=NASDAQ:ADBE
I don't know what ranking factors they are using for this feed. The results vary greatly from a search done at google.com or google.com/news and google.com/finance I'm working with a website that regularly publishes finance-related news and currently gets traffic from google finance. I'm wondering what we can do to optimize our news articles to possibly show more prominently or more often. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemascaro0