What to do with existing URL when replatforming and new URL is the same?
-
We are changing CMS from WordPress to Uberflip. If there is a URL that remains the same I believe we should not create a redirect. However, what happens to the old page? Should it be deleted?
-
More than happy to help and hope that it was of value
-
Hi there Maland,
I'll do my best to break this down as I feel a bit confused. When you migrate to a new CMS hopefully your URLS match up and nothing goes wrong. In reality, this never happens. So think of it from a user point - a user wants to get a resource, make sure they can. They don't care much on the URL. If you get a 404 (page not found) redirect it to the correct location.
It's always fun migrating and normally one of the more stressful parts of doing SEO. I like to do a before and after comparison to map the URLs. This can depending on the size of the site though.
TL;DR
404 bad, 200 good.
you shouldn't need to 'delete' pages if they match the old structure. Redirect users if you do change the structure.Some more reading here - https://moz.com/blog/website-migration-guide
Good luck and check back to let us know how you got on, share the success, shout about the frustration and share what you learnt
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
-
Google tries to index non existing language URLs. Why?
Hi, I am working for a SAAS client. He uses two different language versions by using two different subdomains.
Technical SEO | | TheHecksler
de.domain.com/company for german and en.domain.com for english. Many thousands URLs has been indexed correctly. But Google Search Console tries to index URLs which were never existing before and are still not existing. de.domain.com**/en/company
en.domain.com/de/**company ... and an thousand more using the /en/ or /de/ in between. We never use this variant and calling these URLs will throw up a 404 Page correctly (but with wrong respond code - we`re fixing that 😉 ). But Google tries to index these kind of URLs again and again. And, I couldnt find any source of these URLs. No Website is using this as an out going link, etc.
We do see in our logfiles, that a Screaming Frog Installation and moz.com w opensiteexplorer were trying to access this earlier. My Question: How does Google comes up with that? From where did they get these URLs, that (to our knowledge) never existed? Any ideas? Thanks 🙂0 -
Clean URL vs. Parameter URL and Using Canonical URL...That's a Mouthfull!
Hi Everyone, I a currently migrating a Magento site over to Shopify Plus and have a question about best practices for using the canonical URL. There is a competitor that I believe is not doing it the correct way, so I want to make sure my way is the better choice. With 'Vendor Pages' in Shopify, they show up looking like: https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/vendors?q=Cellucor. Not as clean. Problem is that Shopify also creates https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/cellucor. Same products, same page, just a different more clean URL. I am seeing both indexed in Google. What I want to do is basically create a canonical URL from the URL with the parameter that points to the clean URL. The two pages are very similar. The only difference is that the clean URL page has some additional content at the top of the page. I would say the two pages are 90% the same. Do you see any issue with that?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
International URL Structures
Hi everyone! I've read a bunch of articles on the topic, but I can't seem to be able to figure out a solution that works for the specific case. We are creating a site for a service agency, this agency has offices around the world - the site has a global version (in English/French & Spanish) and some country specific versions. Here is where it gets tricky: in some countries, each office has a different version of the site and since we have Canada for example we have a French and an English version of the site. For cost and maintenance reason, we want to have a single domain : www.example.com We want to be able to indicate via Search Console that each subdomain is attached to a different country, but how should we go about it. I've seen some examples with subfolders like this: Global FR : www.example.com/fr-GL Canada FR: www.example.com/fr-ca France: www.example.com/fr-fr Does this work? It seems to make more sense to use : **Subdirectories with gTLDs, **but I'm not sure how that would work to indicate the difference between my French Global version vs. France site. Global FR : www.example.com/fr France : www.example.com/fr/fr Am I going about this the right way, I feel the more I dig into the issue, the less it seems there is a good solution available to indicate to Google which version of my site is geo-targeted to each country. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | sarahcoutu150 -
URL spacing help
Hi all, easy question: I have a client URL...example.com/giftbags that has been indexed for a while. Should I change the URL to example.com/gift-bags to separate these words for better KW ranking, or would the change be useless at this point? Thanks, -Reed
Technical SEO | | IceIcebaby0 -
Friendly URL
Can be Friendly URL installed on a custom made jobsite using mod rewrite / apache without any big interference to the system itself? Thank you.
Technical SEO | | tomaz770 -
Removing URL Parentheses in HTACCESS
Im reworking a website for a client, and their current URLs have parentheses. I'd like to get rid of these, but individual 301 redirects in htaccess is not practical, since the parentheses are located in many URLs. Does anyone know an HTACCESS rule that will simply remove URL parantheses as a 301 redirect?
Technical SEO | | JaredMumford0 -
Dynamic URLs via Refinements
What is the best way to handle large product pages with many different refinement possibilities. Ex. hard drive - 40 gigs - black case etc. All of these refinements add to the length of the url and potentially create crawling issues as the url is to dynamic. I have seen people canonical all refinements and pages to the main cat page, I have seen others no follow certain refinements. Also in the SEOmoz crawling report it tells me that over two parameters is bad. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Gordian0
