New website

[kidekat]

Hi guys

I work in the marketing department of an ecommerce website. In September we are relaunching the site not only with a totally new design but also a whole new back end system mainly to make it much more search engine friendly. At the moment none of our product pages get crawled which is the main thing that will change.
We currently run a successful affiliate programme and also use the PPC search engines. As all our page URLs will change we will have to resubmit the search terms plus change our deeplinking URLs for our affiliate programme.
But I'm hoping anyone else who has done this before can give me any advice and pointers about other potential problems we could run into. Also, how is it best to let our customers know about the new look of the site and methods of testing their reactions. Sorry for the long question but I'm sure the posts will be relevant to many.

Cheers.

[oilman]

while you do indeed need to get all the links changed I would get a script written that has a one to one relationship table for all the old urls to the new urls and can manage the redirection for you. You're going to have lots of holes and 404s if you don't figure a way to capture them. Not all your affiliates are going to be right on the stick to get stuff changed right away.

[SEO practioner]

As usual, oilman is right

[Mohamed_E]

I suggest that you read Jakob Nielsen's often quoted Alertbox which says that Web Pages Must Live Forever [useit.com].

Over a year ago I split an oversized page into four smaller pages. Since I did not know which of its four children to redirect queries to, I replaced it with a short page explaining the split and pointing to the children.

I would have been happy to swear at the time that there were absolutely no links to it, but I still (one year later) get a good half dozen hits on it every month. Of course it is noindex.

An implementation cost question: What is the cost to the server of a 301 redirect? Of a very large .htaccess? My guess would be essentially zero compared to the cost of serving the page, but I have been wrong before!