What was your experience with changing site url's?
-
I work with a company that is about to move to a new platform.
Because the category and page structure is different every almost every url but the home page will need to be 301 redirected. I know how to do this and am pretty sure I will find and fix 99% ahead of time and not have too many 404's showing up in webmaster tools to clean up.
My question is has anyone who is reading this post had to do this before and what was your experience with organic traffic after you made the switch. I am predicting that even if I successfully redirected 100% of the url's there would be some loss for a couple of months just due to the fact that we are making a major change. My bosses are asking if there will be any loss and I need to tell them what to expect.
-
Is the content staying the same?
If the content is staying the same, and just the url structure is changing, and if the new url structure is not depriving the url of the relevant keyword for the page content...
If all these conditions are satisfied, in my experience moving few websites, replacing only the url structure (theoretically improving it), nothing changed, I mean I didn't experience any traffic being lost in GWT or analytics, I didn't even notice any unusual fluctuation.
Of course keep in minds the traffic is moving, from the old urls to the new ones, so depending on your report and your new url structure you will see it in different places.
-
Hi Kent. This can vary pretty substantially based on a number of factors, but losing organic traffic for a a couple of months would be on the high end of delays and cause for concern towards the tail end of that time. There's a nice migration guide here from 2012 that's still relevant: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos. Mostly it comes down to solid planning and good promotion of the new site address to really help the process along. Cheers!
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 long will old pages stay in Google's cache index. We have a new site that is two months old but we are seeing old pages even though we used 301 redirects.
Two months ago we launched a new website (same domain) and implemented 301 re-directs for all of the pages. Two months later we are still seeing old pages in Google's cache index. So how long should I tell the client this should take for them all to be removed in search?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liamis0 -
What's the best way to use redirects on a massive site consolidation
We are migrating 13 websites into a single new domain and with that we have certain pages that will be terminated or moved to a new folder path so we need custom 301 redirects built for these. However, we have a huge database of pages that will NOT be changing folder paths and it's way too many to write custom 301's for. One idea was to use domain forwarding or a wild card redirect so that all the pages would be redirected to their same folder path on the new URL. The problem this creates though is that we would then need to build the custom 301s for content that is moving to a new folder path, hence creating 2 redirects on these pages (one for the domain forwarding, and then a second for the custom 301 pointing to a new folder). Any ideas on a better solution to this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Site still indexed after request 'change of address' search console
Hello, A couple of weeks ago we requested a change of address in Search console. The new, correct url is already indexed. Yet when we search the old url (with site:www.) we find that the old url is still indexed. Is there another way to remove old urls?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | conversal0 -
Is it necessary to use Google's Structured Data Markup or alternative for my B2B site?
Hi, We are in the process of going through a re-design for our site. Am trying to understand if we need to use some sort of structured data either from Google Structured data or schema. org?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Krausch0 -
Why isn't my site being indexed by Google?
Our domain was originally pointing to a Squarespace site that went live in March. In June, the site was rebuilt in WordPress and is currently hosted with WPEngine. Oddly, the site is being indexed by Bing and Yahoo, but is not indexed at all in Google i.e. site:example.com yields nothing. As far as I know, the site has never been indexed by Google, neither before nor after the switch. What gives? A few things to note: I am not "discouraging search engines" in WordPress Robots.txt is fine - I'm not blocking anything that shouldn't be blocked A sitemap has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools and I have "fetched as Google" and submitted for indexing - No errors I've entered both the www and non-www in WMT and chose a preferred There are several incoming links to the site, some from popular domains The content on the site is pretty standard and crawlable, including several blog posts I have linked up the account to a Google+ page
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jtollaMOT0 -
Duplicate content URLs from bespoke ecommerce CMS - what's the best solution here?
Hi Mozzers Just noticed this pattern on a retail website... This URL product.php?cat=5 is also churning out products.php?cat=5&sub_cat= (same content as product.php?cat=5 but from this different URL - this is a blank subcat - there are also unique subcat pages with unique content - but this one is blank) How should I deal with that? and then I'm seeing: product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 and product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000&cont_ref=giftselector (same content as product-detail.php?a_id=NT001RKS0000000 but from this different URL) How should I deal with that? This is a bespoke ecommerce CMS (unfortunately). Any pointers would be great 🙂 Best wishes, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
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 -
Is 404'ing a page enough to remove it from Google's index?
We set some pages to 404 status about 7 months ago, but they are still showing in Google's index (as 404's). Is there anything else I need to do to remove these?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0