dynamic url migration - maintaining rankings

dynamic url maintaining rankings

[curly_clare]

Hi,

A technical discusion for you:

We are gradually migrating from static Web pages to dynamic Web pages. Having achieved high SE visibility we are concerened that the migration will result in adverse effects on our rankings.

Basically, I am keen to find out how to maintain our search placement during the migration process, assuming that this is possible.

Any ideas? Thanks for your time.

[claus]

I'm very tempted to say "avoid serving 404s and you'll be fine", but perhaps that's a bit too easy, and depending on my understanding of your question it might even be wrong.

The thing is that your ranking does not depend on how your pages are generated. It does not really matter if they are static or dynamic. The ranking depends on the content of the pages, and in the case of Google, even more on the (anchor text of) links pointing to your pages.

In the thread headline you use the words "dynamic url". This is something entirely different than dynamic pages, and a thing like that could seriously harm your ranking.

So, to aid the discussion a bit, and to get better feedback, perhaps you could elaborate a bit on what it is exactly that you want to change on the site?

/claus

[curly_clare]

Thanks Claus,

In simple terms, we are promoting a site that currently uses static htm pages. As the website grows and the product range increases our client is wanting to opt for a dynamic site....we basically need to promote the new dynamic version of the site without loosing our rankings for the static version.

Hope this makes more sense! Thanks again.

[claus]

Hmm... i'm still no wiser as to what you intend to do. Anyway, it doesn't really matter if the file extension is htm, asp, php, or something else, Google will read it as long as it displays HTML. The extensions listed at the bottom of this page are just examples: [google.com...]

This is my top-of-mind list:

(1) Don't put session ID's in your URLs - never-ever make it possible for Googlebot to get the same content from two different URLs
(2a) If "page.htm" is now "page.php" then make sure you have a redirect returning a 301 server status code
(2b) Don't let incoming links (links from other sites to your site) end in 404 errors
(3) Avoid too many parameters in the url (max 2) and keep them short - if you can find a method to do so, keep your URL's the same as before.
(4) Make all navigation standard html links. If you use image links, don't forget to use ALT text.
(5) Don't use flash or javascript (or java) for navigation or anything else you want Googlebot to read.

More info at Google: [google.com...]

I believe these five issues are the most important ones, in decreasing order.

You might not be able to avoid a temporary drop in ranking, as your pages will change and Google will need some time to figure out what happened. The above steps should help make it a temporary one and not a permanent one. The ideal situation would be to keep all the old URLs and make the dynamic pages identical to the non-dynamic version - just build and serve them using some server-side language in stead of an html editor. This might not be possible to do, and even though you did this, you might still see a temporary change.

/claus