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
-
How did these sites get two organic listings?
Hi Guys, If you type the keyword "car seat covers" on Google Australia. You will see one site screenshot below: https://image.prntscr.com/image/lgfcK6DmSSGRo3Jx06yWag.png With double listing and then a site below that with another double listing see: https://image.prntscr.com/image/4yJfPzRjR5mPaQb4rr9l-Q.png Does anyone know why Google is giving both of these double listings, is it something to do with their internal linking? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wozniak650 -
Preserving rankings after migration
I have acquired new a client who wants to migrate to a new platform. He also wants a 100% guarantee we maintain he Google search rankings. How realistic is this? Anyone got a checklist they can recommend?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | muzzmoz0 -
Changing URL to a subdomain?
Hi there, I had a website www.footballshirtcollective.com that has been live since July. It contains both content and eCommerce. I am now separating out the content so that; 1. The master domain is www.footballshirtcollective.com (content) pointing to a new site 2. Subdomain is store.footballshirtcollective.com (ecommerce) - pointing to the existing site. What do you advise I can do to minimise the impact on my search? Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjmaxwell0 -
Why isnt this site ranking?
I just took over for a site and noticed they have no presence for any keywords...not even low ranks. Their backlink profile is not the best, but webmaster tools says they have no manual actions. vonderhaar.com Thoughts on the matter?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx0 -
URL mapping for site migration
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other. This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work. By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO0 -
Dramatic Ranking Changes
Hi, My website is ranked on the 2nd page of Google for the /ncr. Last week suddenly it climbed up to the first page and I let my boss know about it with a quite enthusiasm and happiness 🙂 Then my boss didn't look at it on that day and next day our site was on the second page again and still is. Now I kind of lost reputation in the office, and people start questioning my comments. It wasn't a delusion but I would like to know what it was. No one does any SEO for this 10 years old site, and I've just started an SEO campaign about 1,5 months ago. And I really thought this is it, we are on the first page. But now we are back in to the 2nd page. Is waiting for couple days or weeks to Google to settle right approach for such cases? Or it was just a random bounce or coincidence? Never seen such thing, so I'm quite curious about your opinions or experience if you have.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nunobaronio0 -
Using a 302 re-direct from http://www to https://www to secure customer data
My website sends Customers from a http://www.mysite.com/features page to a https://www.mysite.com/register page which is an account sign-up form using a 302 re-direct. Any page that collects customer data has an authenticated SSL certificate to protect any data on the site. Is this 302 the most appropriate way of doing this as the weekly crawl picks it up as being bad practise? Is there a better alternative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ubique0 -
Changing a URL structure within a site
Im moving a page over from www.domain.com/page to www.domain/category/page currently www.domain.com/page is ranking in google. Would a 301 do the job? is there anything else needed to help keep SE positions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0