Changing website structure.

Whats the best way to do this and keep our rankings?

[rj87uk]

I am looking for information, experience and your help in getting through a big change in the way our website is structured.

We are thinking about moving to a full Ecommerce platform (3rd party), and the structure will have to change to make the website user friendly as it has grown so much. The website ranks at the moment pretty well around 4000 unique visitors a day from Google alone.

What are my options (help)?

Create a completely new website and leave the old one running? Side thought – sandbox.

Do page to page redirects from the old URLs to new ones and hope I keep ranking well?

Re-direct the whole website to another domain that will have the new website? (Not much of an option).

The website does have many deep links to product pages as we are quite well known and many people talk about us in forums, blogs and news.

So any help on what I can do? What are my options?

[trillianjedi]

'Cool URL's never change' <- mantra #1. I wouldn't even 301 them if I could avoid it.

You need to make this a "redesign". Anything other than that has to be considered in the same light as launching a new site, in terms of SE traffic.

So keep all the existing URL's, just update the pages accordingly. It's worth a custom job on the eCommerce software to ensure that, assuming the site is profitable.

URL's from tomorrow can be in a new format, as long as the existing ones remain the same.

I would also be careful about making massive navigation changes if you have a large element of repeat traffic. Folks get used to the way that they interact with a site, it becomes part of the sites "brand"...

TJ

[rj87uk]

trillianjedi I agree with a lot of that. Thanks.

One idea I had was to make a new website / design / brand on our ".com". Slowly build up the organic results and when in 5 months time it ranks as the .co.uk just do a site re-direct to the .com.

What do you think about this? Upside? Downside?

[trillianjedi]

What do you think about this?

'Cool URL's never change' <- mantra #1.

I think the same as my above post to be honest. I wouldn't do it - I would avoid re-directing anything now and avoid setting yourself up for redirects in the future.

The "new" material can be built on the old site with the new URL structure as required. Just update the old pages to reflect any design changes, but keep those URL's in tact.

TJ