Retaining SEO ranking when changing sites

[Vj2011]

I'm hoping someone on this forum can help me with a question about preserving Google ranking when buying an e-commerce site, and operating under a new name.

There are a few complexities in this issue.

1. The current website has been up for 5 years and has a very high google ranking for most of the relevant key words, despite not trading for almost a year. The traffic levels are high - with 80% coming from search engines (mainly Google) and 72% new visitors.

2. However, the back end of this website needs to be changed to get an automated stock control process in place, and to some extent a restructuring will be required.

3. We have registered a new name and will want to trade under that name - therefore there is no history on the domain name.

4. The reason for wanting to change URLS is that the current business ceased trading about a year ago, and prior to that, had a lot of bad reviews on various industry forums.

There are many inward links, some of which we may be able to get moved across to the relevant pages of the new site. We will keep the old site up indefinitely or until the new site traffic and rank has exceeded that of the old site. It would seem sensible to put text on the old site saying something like "Old company is now part of New company" as a logical explanation of the change.

I've read some threads on this site and it would seem that a possible solution would be to use 301 redirects on individual pages.

My questions are:

1. To what extent will a difference in the structure of the old URL and the new URL cause problems with a 301 (e.g. http://www.domain.com/category.php/sub-category/colour would change to: http://www.domain.com/category/sub-category/product). The category descriptors may well change in some instances as well.

2. Is a 301 redirect the right way to go, or should we consider something different.

3. What else should we be considering to preserve as much traffic and rank as possible?

Any advice would be most welcome. Thank you.

[edited by: tedster at 12:38 am (utc) on Jan 7, 2011]
[edit reason] prevent auto-linking of the example URL [/edit]

[aakk9999]

There are quite a few threads here on moving the site to a new domain, here are couple of them:

[webmasterworld.com ]
[webmasterworld.com ]

It would seem sensible to put text on the old site saying something like "Old company is now part of New company" as a logical explanation of the change.

If you are permanently redirecting the old site to a new domain (which is what you should do, page to page 301 permanent redirect), then you will not be able to put this message up since it will never be seen (as the old domain will redirect to new domain).

As to your questions:

1. It does not matter, you are already changing domain name, hence the URL will be a new URL. It may be a bit easier to write .htaccess rules if you preserve the folder structure from the past domain name or use the uniform rule to change it to a new structure. But think it carefully, i.e. plan your whole URL structure so that you do not have to change URLs later on - makes life easier.

2. 301 redirect, page to page basis wherever possible (which should be possible if you are moving the whole site "as is")

3. Here are some initial thoughts
- Make sure all redirects are in one hit, i.e. there are no chain redirects
- do not put new site live until you have all redirects ready to go on the old site - try to do it simultaneously or as close as possible
- 301 redirect will transfer link juice to a new site, although some link juice will be lost. Try to contact as many of sites that link to the old site and see if you can get them to change link to go directly to a new site - it helps build trust
- create webmaster tools account and add both sites to the same webmaster tools account
- try to make as few mistakes as possible, especially with URL structure as it is painful to fix it afterwards
- if your old site is changing whois information, it would be a good idea that the new site has the same whois

Somewhere on these boards there was a big checklist on what to do with site move, but I cannot find it. See if you can find it - you may find it helpful.

[aakk9999]

And another one - almost forgot (although it is a part of chain redirects already mentioned) - if the old site has some permanent redirects already set up - these will have to change so that it now goes directly to the new site URL.

For example, if the old site has redirect set up from example.com to www.example.com then when you are setting up redirects for the old site to go to a new site, you will want to change this redirect to go from example.com to www.newexample.com (and NOT from example.com --> www.example.com --> www.newexample.com)

So you would have to find all current redirects on the old site and make sure they redirect to correct page on the new site in one go.

[Vj2011]

Thanks very much for the advice. Really helpful.