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Hey guys

I need a little help with setting up a big 301.

Background:

It's a bit of a mess as the old site is a total mess after being online for 10 years plus. It has html and php pages, and a mod rewrite to redirect old html links to the newer php version of those pages.

It's now moving to a new site and as the domain name and URL structure has changed we can't use any fancy regex and have to do a page to page redirect.

There are 1500 pages to redirect.

However, the old site has thousands of linking root domains, and some of these are to the old html pages (which currently redirect to the php pages) and some to the newer php pages.

Question:

My initial plan was to leave the mod rewrite and only redirect the php pages. That means 1500 individual redirects instead of 3000 if I individually redirect both the php and html pages.

I'm not sure what's best to be honest. We don't really want multiple hops in the redirect (html>php>new site), but surely 1500 redirects is better than 3000!

Does anyone have any advice on which option may be best, or even a better option?

Thanks

Well, you tell Google where you are specifically located (city) via places rather than GWT.

It looks to me that your local listing is completely unoptimised.

There are no pictures or videos and the listing looks incomplete, plus it seems you have very few citations etc.

You're not ranking in local search and your listing is very weak compared to others so it makes sense.

Don't get me wrong, I've only spent 5 minutes looking at it, but IMO you need to look at local factors. The link I posted will show you lots of the things you need to do.

Hey

Sure, but is your local listing much stronger? It looks like it's not as you seem to have very few citations from a super quick hunt.

http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

Check out the above link (it's a LONG read!), as these are the kinds of things you proabably need to be considering.

Hey Ray

I couldn't find your places listing anywhere. However you do seem to have very few local listings which would likely have an effect on your local rankings.

Check out this search:

"01909 449 501" -creativefireplaces.co.uk

It only shows 13 results, much less than I would have expected.

Have you changed your number at any point as consistent  NAP details are very important.

Thanks Sebastian.

Yes I already have VWO code installed on the clients site so that's good news. I didn't realise I could set up a test for just traffic from a specific referrer URL.

So basically I can split test the homepage versus a completely new landing page in VWO to prove the concept. Thanks!

Thanks yes, i'm only investigating options right now of course.

As you say it's a very valuable link (I wish i had one of those!).

I'm certainly not going to make major changes until more research is done. However if we could double the conversion rate (which I think is possible in this case), it would really be a big win!

This might be a bit of a complex question as it has many implications and I’d really appreciate some expert advice.

I have a client who has one specific .gov link which is absolutely amazing. It doesn’t have any anchor text and goes straight to the homepage. However it drives quite a lot of revenue! It’s lovely as SEO’s to think of links actually driving revenue rather than assisting rankings of course.

Over the last 30 days this single govt.  link has driven:

418 clicks, 61 conversions, $7,500 revenue

Not bad I hear you say! J

I really want to extract maximum value from this and I’ sure it would perform far better if it went to a really tightly focused landing page rather than the homepage. It really is hyper-targeted buyer traffic (as the stats show) but could perform even better in my opinion.

I can’t change the link, that’s not possible unfortunately. However I can do some server side stuff to redirect traffic from just this link to a desired new page.

However, what are the SEO implications of this in the opinion of some of the experts here?

Obviously the link itself is valuable from an SEO perspective and I don’t want to lose that. I’m not sure how Google would treat the link if this were to be done.

Also I really want to A/B test the homepage versus a landing page to ensure that it really does give an improvement. I’m not even sure how to achieve that given the difficulty in this situation.

Any advice would really be useful!

Thanks J