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Hello Jeff,

Thanks for your response as well! 
Like you said, I think we have to customize some things in our CMS system (Composite C1). 
I found some very helpfull documents which will help us with this.

With a few tweaks I hope we can leave everything the same during the migration and change things later in small steps.

Thanks a lot Jeff,

Regards,

Jorg

Hello Peter,

Thanks for your response!
We can indeed set up 301 redirects, that should be fine. But like most SEO's would recommend, we would like to keep everything as much the same as possible.

We are currently looking for the options to adapt the new CMS systems that it lets us customize every URL on page level.

Thanks a lot!

Regards,

Jorg

Hello everyone,

We're currently preparing a website redesign for one of our important websites. It is our most important website, having good rankings and a lot of visitors from Search Engines, so we want to be really careful with the redesign.

Our strategy is to keep as much in place as possible. At first, we are only changing the styling of the website, we will keep the content, the structure, and as much as URLs the same as possible.

However, we are switching from a custom build CMS system which created URLs like www.homepage.com/default-en.aspx  
No we would like to keep this URL the same , but our new CMS system does not support this kind of URLs.

The same with for instance the URL: www.homepage.com/products.html
We're not able to recreate this URL in our new CMS.

What would be the best strategy for SEO? Keep the URLs like this:
www.homepage.com/default-en
www.homepage.com/products

Or doesn't it really matter, since Google we view these as completely different URLs?

And, what would the impact of this changes in URLs be?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Best Regards,

Jorg

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the helpful answer! I did a lot of research and also concluded that both options can work. I just haven't found any supporting case studies which clearly shows which of the two alternatives would work best. So if anyone knows a good article related to URL-structure and my question in specific, that would be very welcome!

Thanks!

Regards,

Jorg

Hello all,

I have a question regarding a website I am working on. I’ve read a lot of Q en A’s but couldn’t really find the best answer.

For one of our new websites we are thinking about the structure of this website and the corresponding URL-structure. Basically we have a main product (and a few main keywords) which should drive the most traffic to our website, and for which we want to optimize our homepage.

Besides those main keywords, we have an enormous base of long-tail keywords from which we would like to generate traffic. This means we want to create a lot of specific pages which are optimized.

My main question is the following:

We are thinking of two options:

• Option 1: www.example.com/example-keyword-one
• Option 2: www.example.com/directory/example-keyword-one

With option 1 we will link directly from our homepage to the most important pages (which represent our most important keywords). All the pages with the long tail content will be linked from another section on our website, which is one click away from our homepage (specifically a /solutions page which is linked from the footer). All the pages with long-tail content will have this structure www.example.com/example-keyword-one so the URLs will not contain the directory /solutions

With option 2 we will use more subdirectories in our URLs. Specifically, for all the long tail content we would use URLs like this: www.example.com/solutions/example-keyword-one
The directories we want to use wouldn't really have added value in terms of SEO, since they don’t represent important keywords.

• So what is the best way to go? Option 1, straightforward, short URL’s which don’t really represent the linking structure of our website, but only contain important keywords. Or option 2, choose for more directories in our URLs which represent the linking structure of our website, but contain directories which don’t represent important keywords.
• Would the keyword ‘solutions’ in the directory (which doesn’t really relate to the content on the page) have a negative impact on our rankings for that URL?