Consolidating product pages during website migration

[katelynroberts]

Hello,

We are an e-commerce & content site undergoing a website migration and redesign in the coming months.  We will be getting an entirely new website.  Many of our URLs will be changing:

Current URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/product-title-here
Future URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/product-title-here

So we're aware we will be using plenty of 301 redirects to achieve this.

Further to this though, we currently have a product page for each configuration of a product - for example, a single-sided bookmark has its own page and URL, and the double-sided version of the same bookmark has its own page and URL.  In our site redesign, we are hoping to consolidate each of these instances into one product page where users can select single or double-sided and the price will update accordingly.  The bookmark URLs would then go from:
_www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/bookmark-single-sided  _(call this URL A for simplicity)www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU67890/bookmark-double-sided  (call this URL B)

To (after migrating to the new URL structure for the new site, and the now-consolidated single- & double-sided product pages):
www.mysite.com/catalog/bookmark  (call this URL C)

• What is the best way to make this transition without losing too much of our SEO value?  I understand there is nearly always traffic loss with URL changes but I'd like to at least minimize the damage as best I can.  We have backlinks and ranks for many product pages so I want to make sure we pass as much of this as we can.
• (And is this at all further complicated by the fact that URL A & B won't exist on the new site, and URL C doesn't exist on the current site?  Does this impact the use of the 301 redirects and if so, how?)
• Are we better off to approach this page consolidation after the site migration and treat it as a separate project?  This is something that is important to our user experience, and is definitely a change we want to make.

Any advice is appreciated - thank you! I'm a fairly beginner-intermediate SEO so this is all somewhat new but I want to be able to at least convey some understanding to our developer of what we need to do.  I was able to find this discussion (https://moz.com/community/q/merging-pages-and-seo) which describes a similar situation and solutions if we were just consolidating the pages but doesn't quite have the complicating factor of the entire site migration happening at the same time.

Thanks so much!

[katelynroberts]

Thanks Alex; this is really helpful insight.  Lots to think about!  Thank you again - I sincerely appreciate it!

[Xiano]

Well, I guess that's the million dollar question.

It's not as simple that Google will simply replace the SERP with the new page. That will be the apparent behaviour until Google updates the listing, as anyone who clicks the link will be redirected, but Google will quickly "notice" and then reapply the algorithm and decide whether the new page should be in the same place. I wouldn't expect that fact that the old page ranked to directly affect the ranking of the newly redirected page, however, the fact that any links to the old page will be being redirected will have an impact.

As far as new rank, I would expect a similar effect to that of simply updating all the content and not changing the URL, and of course, we don't know what exactly would happen then.

If I had to guess, given what you've said, I would say that very specific searches may rank worse (E.g. "double-sided bookmarks") but that more generic terms might rank better (E.g. "customizable bookmarks")

[katelynroberts]

Hi Alex,

Thank you for your detailed response!  This is assuring.  To answer your question, we are keeping the same domain name but it would be hosted differently and supported differently than it currently is.

Definitely guilty of overthinking these things!  Ha.

This is really helpful and re-assuring.  Can you provide any insight on how this page consolidation would affect rankings?  Say we have our double-sided bookmark product page ranking on the first SERP for the query "customizable bookmarks".  With our migration and page consolidation, this product page will be redirected to a new bookmark page.  When Google crawls us next and sees we've redirected that page, it'll start displaying the new page in the SERPs in place of the old - in the same rank as the old page?  Is that correct?  And then that rank might drop if it seems that new page is not meeting searcher's needs in the way the old page was?

Just wanted to see if you had any thoughts on that side of it.

Thanks again Alex - so so much!

Katie

[Xiano]

When you say migration, are you talking about moving the site to a new domain, or simply to a new platform while maintaining the current domain? To be fair, I don't think it makes too much difference either way, I was just trying to get it clear in my head.

I think you may be over thinking it.

• _What is the best way to make this transition without losing too much of our SEO value?  I understand there is nearly always traffic loss with URL changes but I'd like to at least minimize the damage as best I can.  We have backlinks and ranks for many product pages so I want to make sure we pass as much of this as we can. _

  I would simply redirect both the old URLs to the new URL with a 301, I don't see any issue with doing this as the new page will have all the relevant content.

• (And is this at all further complicated by the fact that URL A & B won't exist on the new site, and URL C doesn't exist on the current site?  Does this impact the use of the 301 redirects and if so, how?)
  No, not really. So long as the new page exists before you create the 301 (or at the same time) there is no issue there.

• Are we better off to approach this page consolidation after the site migration and treat it as a separate project?  This is something that is important to our user experience, and is definitely a change we want to make.
  I don't think so, I would definitely do it as a single project. Except from a "it's slightly less complicated if we break it into parts" point of view, the only benefit SEO-wise in breaking it into two projects would be from a monitoring angle, i.e. if something were to go wildly wrong with your rankings you would know which part of the transition had the impact and maybe be able to diagnose quicker.

Hope that helps!

Alex