Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Please forgive me if I'm posting to a wrong forum, although I'm pretty sure this is the right one.
I'm purchasing my first website soon, and since the site has a lot of good content in my mind, but poor SEO, I'd like to make changes in order to improve it.
There are 50-60 pages on this website.
1. The ownership changes.
2. In need to change page structure and link titles on pretty much all of the pages.
3. In need to change the url structure, meaning that the majority of the url's will have to be changed.
4. In need to delete a couple of pages.
First of all, what do you think is the best possible way to handle these changes? 301 the old pages to new ones? 404 for deleted pages?
The site's not getting a huge amount of visitors from search engines, but it is starting to rank for some smaller keywords. These changes are pretty big, so I'm sure something not-so-nice is going to happen at first. How long do you think it will take for things to get back to normal?
Looking for any kind of suggestions.
Thanks for your help in advance, and looking forward to participating in the discussions of WebmasterWorld.
First off, if you are making changes that you are confident are for the long term good of your site, go for it: search engines will catch you up even if there are initial hiccups.
301 the old pages to new ones? 404 for deleted pages?
Yep - if the content is the same, but the URL has changed, 301. If the content doesn't exist any more 404.
From the sort of changes you describe, I wouldn't anticipate any serious problems. if you're adding useful content you may well see short term improvements.
The worst case scenario is that the site experiences a short term lack of trust. How serious an impact this could have depends on the links into the pages. Enough links and the site will have no issues. Few links and you're likely to have to wait at least a couple of weeks for things to settle down, and potentially a much longer period.
