New Site! New Start?

benefits of keeping an old site vs ditching?

[Kings on steeds]

Hi Guys,

I'm currently working for a widget company, we sell lots of nice widgets and we have a reasonable presents on the SERPs for our widget base keywords. But conversions are few and life in the digital word seems crawl. So we're starting a fresh, a whole host of new products and a brand new all singing all dancing website. We're pushing a whole new online strategy and we are very optimistic.

But this is my question, is it worth me spending days settings manual 301 redirects for all our old URI's to our new ones, the old ones where pants anyway and I feel like this is a tie to the past for very little benefit, surely a nice new site with lots of nice new content that's much easier and friendlier than previous should be treated as a nice new fresh start, dump all the old and start again?

I guess what I am asking is, do any of you have experience with out right dumping an old site, serps and all, and starting again? am I commiting SEO suicide in doing so, or is it another one of those (yer its helps, but not the end of the world things)...?

Look forward to your replies.
Alan

[tangor]

New site? Go new. No need for old? No worries. Need it? 301. Otherwise invest time in new site. Been there, done that, probably not your desired answer. Life is too short, the web works too fast, no need to expend too much time. My thoughts.

[webboy1]

I assume your keeping the same domain?

My suggestion would be to use the redirects and take advantage of what PR or link juice they have generated over time, even if its not much. At the very least it would give your new site a helping hand in terms of where it ranks in Google.

Manual 301 redirects are a pain if there are a huge number of URLs, but you could use some fancy coding to create grouo 301 redirects based on categories and so on. This would save a lot of time.

I'd agree that no, it's not the absolute end of the world if you don't, but i'd say the benefit of taking advantage of old link juice FAR outways the non-benefit of not doing it.

If you were buying a new house you wouldn't just leave all your old furniture becuase you were planning on getting new furniture. You'd take it and use it (sell it) to generate money to help furnish the new house faster.

Likewise with websites, use the older URLs (via 301) to improve the quality of your new site, don't just leave them.

[phranque]

quoting tedster here:
"I found it more effective to do a ranking, traffic and backlink study and then only redirect the key urls, letting the rest go 404." [webmasterworld.com]

[explorador]

A nice and right domain name might do miracles on a new site instead on working on an old website. Perhaps you won't need redirects at all.