Forum Moderators: LifeinAsia
This site has some ok listings in directories and search engines, and several of the inside pages are listed in Yahoo and doing rather well.
You don't want to lose the client, but all the work you have done will essentially be void since all of the URLs of the new site will be completely different. There is also not enough time for spiders to index the new urls before Christmas is over.
What do you do to make the best of the situation? Is there any way to 'save' this site from a search engine standpoint in time for the Christmas buying season?
Very quickly, create a page for every page existing in the SE. Whew! That may seem a lot of pages and a tall order, but, at least you'll save the click-thoughs to the new home page.
You could also use a page refresh, but, I probably wouldn't bother as most surfers are savvy enough to click through.
In the event that that is not an option, I'm wondering if it would be possible to leave up pages with the filenames of the best listed pages and utilize a 301 redirect to the corresponding pages on the new site. I believe that would be seamless and invisible to users, and then the new pages would be picked up by the search engines.
>live December 1, so it will be ready for the Christmas shopping season.
The internet shopping season is 80% over with by Dec 1. The only thing left is to make sure the product ships. I believe the last study I saw was Dec 10 was the latest most consumers would risk buying online.
Free Engines you can still impact:
Alta: if you already have listings, leverage them. Link to the new pages from the old pages.
Fast: doing a good job of indexing routinely.
Google: Still some time. Figure 2-3 weeks to index right now.
Excite - Ink - forget.
Northernlight: they'll index it, but no traffic available.
Looksmart: increase your listings if you can.
Yahoo: Don't let them remove any page with a link pointed at it from yahoo. Change ok - but the url must live.
ODP: you've probably already got all the listings you can get there.
If the pages are changing url's, get something up right now with content on it at those urls and submit.
Ideally, you would continue to deliver the intire old site to spiders, while directing humans to the new location of the corresponding content. If that's not an option because the site's too big, then you need to identify the most critical entry points and concentrate on them.
If you can only preserve the critical pages, it can be a bit of a short term solution because navigation stucture plays such a big role. If spiders revisting previously indexed pages aren't able to crawl to other pages, the rankings will eventually slip, but you should be o.k. through the holiday season.
I'd start by dumping the top 50 or so keywords from your log files into your positiong software and run a report to see how many total pages are being used as entry points to the site. That will really tell you how difficult of a project it will be, and it also will provide you with some data to present to your client. I worked on a similar project recently where we found that the search engine traffic was spread out over more than 150 pages. When we showed them how much traffic they'd loose by eliminating those pages, and how big of a project it would be to preserve them, they ended up reworking their plans.
I wouldn't discount Inktomi at all - any client in a hurry to make sales for the Holidays should absolutely take advantage of their paid inclusion program for product pages - it's so cheap, how could they afford not to get instant spidering?
Another thing to keep in mind is entry pages in general. A quick look at a recent WebTrends report will provide a listing of the top entry pages. In this case about 20 pages of the site accounted for 90% of the entry traffic. Those URLs will also be mapped to a similar page in the new site. Between those two, about 95% of visitors will be spared 404 aggrivation and end up on a page similar to what had been bookmarked.
They are going to map top ranking pages to equivalent pages in the new site and include a redirect to them.
Won't that get the page tossed out of the SE when spiders see it is being redirected?
Curious,
Brian
