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The new site will be more product-oriented and will have new directory names, as well as new page names. Some of the existing pages have listings in the larger search engines, so I'll turn them into doorway pages of sorts. But the bulk of the pages will go bye-bye.
How do most people handle this? Explanation on the 404 page with a link to a new sitemap? Thanks for any thoughts...
How is the traffic for this site?
What percentage of traffic comes from search engines?
Which pages are good doorway for your SE traffic?
If you got some good pages in the lot, please keep alive the with the same URL and the same content. Archive all those little gold chests hidden in the lot.
If your traffic does not come from search engines, then you can scrap the hole lot.
I use to archive old sites, and put a big gif to the "new" homepage on each page. This extra line of code wont hurt the listings.
Unfortunately, no. New subject matter and topics will bring about new page names and placement.
>>> How is the traffic for this site? What percentage of traffic comes from search engines? Which pages are good doorway for your SE traffic?
Traffic has been increasing over the past year, with about 40% coming from search engines. (Granted, some of this is from searching by company name). There are about 10 pages that I'll probably turn into doorway pages, but the rest will be scrapped. And yes, with as much as I paid for SE inclusion, I sure don't want to just toss that down the drain.
Mostly, I guess I'm concerned about 2 things. How a potential customer will react to getting a 404 from a search engine entry, and how ranking will be affected by various search engines when they realize that they list some non-existing pages. (because we know how clean and up-to-date their databases are!). Thanks for the thoughts...
You loose him.
>>and how ranking will be affected by various search engines when they realize that they list some non-existing pages.
They drop it from the index.
As long the new site has also been re-written, search engines wont see new pages as duplicate content.
This is why I keep most of the archived site live, with a big gif inviting to the new door.
It can point to homepage or a main rellevant section page. (some good link text at the bottom of page wont hurt neither)
The only challenge left is to avoid duplicate URL while redoing the site.
Currently, the website has 6 basic sub-directories, based on each individual business unit.
The new site will be more product-oriented.
I hope a lot of people caught that juicy tidbit. In my experience, that is the best move a corporate website can make. The tendency is to design the site the way the company is organized - it makes for easier content production and so on.
But asking the user to learn how a company is structured in order to make sense of a website is not wise, in almost every case. Usability will go up a lot when the architecture is designed to match the way the USER thinks about the products or services, rather than the way the company thinks about itself internally.
I'd be very interested in hearing any results you can share after the redesign is in place for a bit.
