Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have a client who is a large mailorder company. All I've ever done for them really is handle their AdWords account - their website has been in existence for years before I was involved with them. They currently have around 1500 *static* pages (no database!) with products on them, and a shopping cart that was custom built for them by some guy working on the side. They have three domain names (representing three product lines) all pointing to the site, and nothing was ever done to make sure things were being spidered correctly, hence they have around 150 urls each spidered on two of the domains, and the remainder on the third. I've been telling them for years this was messed up (and they took a two month severe hit in Google last year) but in spite of this, because they've been around a long time and their pages are text rich, they've enjoyed top positions in some VERY competitive markets.
Ok, cut to now. They've just had their site completely overhauled, and they're getting ready to relaunch it on ONE of the domain names. The site has been done in Cold Fusion, so not only are they changing all the urls, they're going to new hosting on IIS (currently on UNIX/Apache) They were supposed to be consulting with me all along to make sure it was going to be structured properly, but of course they didn't, and now that it's done for all intents and purposes, they've come to me to ask about search engine issues, and they want to launch pronto.
I've already told them they're going to take a six to twelve month hit, and of course they panicked. They didn't have anything in place for titles and meta descriptions; but I think we have that covered now.
The big thing facing me now is the existing urls - of course, they're all changed. And I know absolutely nothing about IIS whatsoever. If we were hosting it here, we could fix them up just fine.
It's one of these things where there's so many things going on, I'm not sure which to tackle first - the multiple domains, the url rewrites, other issues I may not even know about.
Their web development company has no idea on any of these issues; all they do is build the site. I haven't even SEEN it yet.
Where do I start?
the multiple domains, the url rewrites, other issues I may not even know about.
I don’t mean to sound negative in any way because you sound like a true professional and somebody who doesn’t back down from a challenge, but do you really want to get involved in this? I never saw a web site I didn't have an urge to fix until reading this thread.
Their web development company has no idea on any of these issues; all they do is build the site.
Where do I start?
The permanent redirects from the old to the new url’s is the thing I would try and hatch a plan for first. Challenge there will be if the content just doesn’t match up. If you can end up with a minimum of dead pages not pointing to anything new, and a majority of new pages, being pointed to by an old page, that would help. (but you already know that) 1,500 pages is a lot, but possible.
If you can get the host to agree, there's a third party utilty called ISAPI Rewrite that essentially gives IIS the same functionalty that you can get with Apache.
Yea, I was looking at that yesterday. The host will do whatever we ask/demand that they do; my client is not a small company in its field, and the host is going to help out and give us what we need, or we will be finding a new host. After I explained the necessity, the CEO backed me up on that.
At least they didn't launch without telling you :-)
Well, yes. But I grab all their logs every day and run them through some weblog analyzers, so I'd know pretty quickly if they launched. Heck, when there's a problem with the site, I typically know before they do and have to tell them to go shake up the current host or whatever.
I don’t mean to sound negative in any way because you sound like a true professional and somebody who doesn’t back down from a challenge, but do you really want to get involved in this?
Thank you for the vote of confidence. Yea, it's a challenge alright. But I have some personal ties to this company, and I genuinely want to see them get it right after all this time, they're a longtime client, and we built our company on the foundation of extreme customer service. I think they'll be amazed when they see what they COULD do, if it's done right. Plus I look at it as a huge learning opportunity for me. We'll be charging them and it won't be cheap, but I'm sure I'll spend more time on it than I'll bill. But if I learn something in the process, it'll be worthwhile.
These issue are all part of “building” web sites.
It is when WE build a website, but we didn't build this one. Apparently others have different views (that could be an item in itself) I successfully transitioned a customer from a one page order form to a shopping cart system without losing anything the serps recently, but in that case, I created the original site, I configured the shopping cart site, and since we hosted it, we had control over everything. This will be different.
The permanent redirects from the old to the new url’s is the thing I would try and hatch a plan for first. Challenge there will be if the content just doesn’t match up. If you can end up with a minimum of dead pages not pointing to anything new, and a majority of new pages, being pointed to by an old page, that would help. (but you already know that) 1,500 pages is a lot, but possible.
We're meeting next week to start making lists of what to do and who will do it. That's top of the list. I told them they should NOT plan on launching until we get a good handle on this. They're not happy about that, but they'd rather delay than lose a year in Google.
And of course, the other shoe to drop is the fact that their current web presence is only a very small portion of entire catalog inventory. So the old site has around 1500 products and 200 categories; the new site has 10,000 products and 1500 categories.
Heh, I could start a blog on this.
Do it gradually. Use your database and with every product item or category have an additional column that tells you whether this one has been converted or not. Run a process or cron job that will update one page each hour, or each two hours. What this will do is just update the database entry. Then, have a script running at the top of the code that checks the URL against what it should be based on the value in this column. If it is not the new url and the variable says it should be, do a 301. Doing this gradually is very, very, very important. You want to calmly do it without Google noticing. This is the idea, and it's extremely important to ensure that the process is transparent to the search engine. If you change only a small percentage every week, Google will not assume a) that the site has been sold b) that it has to recrawl it to determine its integrity. It will assume that the site is still owned by the long term owners, and won't penalize it in the short term. Depending on your PR and how important google thinks your page is, every individual page that is changed should be at least up to 60% of its original rank within 3-4 months. If you do this gradually, the loss is almost transparent.
2) Titles should be approached the same way. Use the same variable.
3) Body and content "could" need the same slow transition, although I don't necessarily think this is likely because Google would be beyond assanine to penalize sites for updating their content or adding content. Although I don't have lots of experience with this (probably because I have never experienced something like that).
I think a 6-12 month hit is a serious overestimate unless the root domain has a very low PR. Even if you overhauled the whole domain overnight, you'd see resurfacing in about 4 months.
