Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I asked him how important search was to his business, and needless to say, the answer is "very". The current site is well-indexed, and ranks well for a number of search terms (which point to the home page), but from listening to the client talk, much of the traffic that leads to sales is derived from searches at the long tail end i.e. people searching for very specific items, for which there are no competing pages so he always comes out number 1 - these items are not on the home page, but in deeper pages.
My concern is this: if we move the content from old CMS to new CMS, whilst the content will be the same, the URL's will be different. I assume that this is going to have an effect on his rankings, but cannot quantify what this effect will be.
One of the possibilities open to me is to develop a URL re-writer for him which interprets old urls and forwards them to the correct page, which is fairly easy, but writing a url rewriter to parse HTML on the way out of the server so that to the search engines the site looks the same is not a particulalry trivial task.
The question is: do I need to do this, or will his ranking position be restored once the site has been deeply indexed and the new urls picked up?
Cheers
It sounds like when you make the change, the only page that will stay the same is the homepage, all other pages (or most) will be new URLs.
The best case scenario is that your client will likely lose the vast majority of his search engine traffic until all the pages are properly reindexed (maybe 3-6 months). The worst case scenario is the site is "lost" and either never recovers or recovers in somewhere over a years time.
Another thing to consider is the deep links. All those will need to be 301'd to their new URLs or you will lose the benefit of all the acquired deep links to the site.
This kind of a major URL restructuring is never a good thing unless it is absolutely necessary.
If it ain't broke..don't fix it. :)
If it ain't broke..don't fix it. :)
Thanks for the very welcome advice. I'm basically going to lay out before the customer his options and what the implications are, and let him decide.
All the Best
Hedwig
Someone on WebmasterWorld asked: Instead of zeroing the site, why not create a totally new one? Good advice - i took it.
On the other hand i've seen a site of PR 5 go through such a change and positions in Google returned and where better within 2-3 months.
The question is - can you afford this?
I see absolutely no reason for new URLs. Why do you think you need to do this? My site is about 1,300 pages in Joomla and I can make a URL pretty much anything I'd want.
in any case, you will have no problems, as long as you have a 301 rule from old pages to new.
none,
your traffic and rankings will transfer.
I have had to do this three times, after an unhappy move from
asp to asp.net,
then to php,
then to a new php system with completely different re-write rules.
as long as your 301 is done properly, you will be fine.
Joomla has a SEF Advance module that allows you to pick any suffix you want. So even if you're running php you can still have a URL ending in .asp That's a commercial module that costs all of 40 euro. I'd think other CMS would have similar offerings.
