A great reminder for us all. Thanks for sharing Dana. #RCS

The transition I mentioned would allow for a smoother migration process rather then a "cold turkey" switch from the old site to the new site. You clearly recognize the end goal is to create your new site and delete the old site. The good news is that change does not have to happen over night.

You can build out your new site completely and go live with it. At that point you would update any external links you control along with your advertisements, signatures, etc. You would also want to reach out to partners and any sites with links that you can influence. Update those links so they point to your new pages.

The final step is the redirection of your 140k page old site to the appropriate pages on the new site. Clearly you wish to begin with the most prominent pages such as your landing pages along with any important pages such as "Contact Us", your reservation system, etc.

The next step would be applying your redirect rules to the remaining pages. Extensive testing will be required.

You should set up GA or another tracking tool to monitor your old site. You will want to closely monitor activity for quite some time. Specifically look for any issues with 404s and multiple redirects.

With respect to your anchor text, I suspect it was used to sculpt your site so your link value was focused on a particular page for each topic. When you have 140 pages on a given topic, you can pursue an incredible amount of longtail phrases. Now I suspect you may have 4 pages for each area: Rome, Rome by Air, Rome by Car, and Rome hotels. If that is the case your future anchor text linking will be a lot more straight forward.

I want to say "I wouldn't be concerned about the anchor text" but you have a major project ahead of you, you are highly dependent on SEO and there are many opportunities for something to go wrong. In that context, I would share the anchor text would be on the list of things to think about, but the proper redirects is a much larger concern.

A final thought I would offer: this is all high level, generic advice. I would recommend hiring a SEO who could offer a proper evaluation of your site along with a migration plan. Once the change has been completed and tested, you should gain many advantages with your new site. Hopefully they will offset any loss from the migration. Once you are confident in your new site, I would recommend a SEO campaign promoting your new site.

Nick,

Sounds like you have a good strategy. I only have two additional items to share based on your latest reply.

www.url.com/resort_hotels/hotels_in_rome.asp

That url seems a bit spammy to me. Mentioning "hotels" twice is something I would avoid. I would consider something along the lines of the below options instead:

www.url.com/resorts/hotels_in_rome

www.url.com/resort_hotels/rome

www.url.com/hotels/rome

I also wanted to talk about the landing pages for cars and air travel once more. Before directing all your current pages to a generic page I would take a look at the existing 140 pages and ask once again, do any of the pages have anything that is unique which can be used for the location based car and air landing pages?

Your plans are to develop these pages with quality content over time, which is great. I hate the idea of having establishing pages for each area, pulling back to having one generic page, then expanding again to location-based pages.

If you sincerely intend to develop these pages on a reasonable time period, I would suggest establishing one page for each location even if it was thin on content to start with. Driving directions, local driving laws, testimonials, anything that can be used as a starting point to hold your footing would be preferred.

If you do pull back to a generic "car rentals" page, I have two ideas. Build out your location landing page for one area such as London. Closely watch your conversion rates on users on the London page versus the generic page. If there is a significant difference, it may help speed up your transition. If you realize you are losing $$ every day you don't have those pages, then perhaps you can hire additional help to speed up the process.

The final idea would be to build country-based landing pages for car rentals as an stop-gap measure. Your Milan, Rome, etc pages could all direct to "Cars Italy" and "Air Italy".

There are tons of choices on the internet for travel providers. You have an extremely well established user base. My top concern for any migration is to maintain all my existing relationships. Some travel sites do great with a single landing page for air/cars/hotels. It sounds like your site has catered to clients in a specific way, and I would be sensitive to maintaining your current user experience.

One last idea that just came to me. After the migration poll users for feedback. Take surveys, offer discounts, generate hype but engage users because they will offer a different point of view which you may not have considered.

Your understanding is correct.

Google does not care how many directories appear in a URL. The two URLs you offered as an example are viewed equally by Google. What's important is how many clicks it takes users to access those links.

Hi Elad.

Alan's answer is 100% correct. A .org site has absolutely no inherit value greater or less then a .com site with respect to search engine ranking. In fact, all the domains ranging from .net, .info, .edu, .gov etc all have the same value, zero. The value they gain is by building your site, adding content and earning links.

Where a particular domain has increased value is in public perception. A .com is seen as the legitimate business domain, which is as the domain was intended. Think of any major business such as McDonalds, Walmart, Facebook, Google, ATT, etc. and simply add a .com to it, you will land on the company's site. That is not the case of any other domain.

In that sense, .org is seen as for non-profits, .edu for educational institutions, and so forth. This is the public perception and it is by design. If you attempt to run a .org as a commercial site, you are likely to lose some traffic due to people not willing to conduct normal commercial business (i.e. shop online) with a .org site. SEOmoz pulls it off nicely in large part because of all the free SEO offerings: blog articles, Q&A, tools, etc. The basic services are offered for free and users can pay for upgrades. This business model combined with an exceptionally friendly organization and customer service works, but most businesses would not be able to pull it off.

With respect to an exact match, an Exact Match Domain (EMD) has been devalued and it is ridiculously overvalued by people who do not understand SEO. The domain name is one of over 200 ranking factors. You will find all the best names such as "insurance.org" have been taken. If you find a name left, it is because no one else wants it. The bottom line, the amount of traffic you can obtain with the EMD is not worth the effort it takes to provide the content and backlinks to make it work. You will receive a ranking boost for the exact match search, but not the rest of the searches for your site.

You clearly have a firm belief a .org site is advantageous. I am certain it is not, but feel free to purchase the domain and prove us all wrong. You clearly will have a bargain as there are plenty of domains available.

It is a common practice for a site's developer to provide a self-promoting footer link in the site's they develop. There is no harm in doing so. You should not expect any noticeable value from the link either.

The entire concept of a valued link is an "independent vote". More specifically, it is a natural link which a user chose to provide. Links from sites you develop or host on your server are not chosen by the site owner. You choose to place the link. You could argue the site owner could choose to opt-out, but that is a another matter.

Google offers very low value to links in footers. Google also offers a lower value to site-wide links. Google also devalues links from sites on the same server. The bottom line is these links are not earned and you should not expect any value from search engines for them. If you build a high quality site then adding a footer link may occasionally earn your site a visit from someone interested in having their site developed. That needs to be enough for you.

You are referring to Sitelinks.

Sitelinks are provided based on keyword searches where a given site's structure and content is highly relevant to where Google decides to provide additional exposure for the site. There is not any singular adjustment you can make to gain sitelinks. It is outside of your control.

You can strongly increase the likelihood of your site being listed with Sitelinks by improving the quality of your site's architecture along with the quality and quantity of content. Learn more here: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=47334

Jay, you are asking a great question and the answer is yes, links that are offered from URL shortener services build DA.

Think of those links as 301s. When you use http://bit.ly/xyz that URL is 301'd to the actual web address. As with all 301s, you do lose a bit of link juice due to the 301, but 90%+ of the value will remain.