Best approach to launch a new site with new urls - same domain
-
We have a high volume e-commerce website with over 15K items, an average of 150K visits per day and 12.6 pages per visit. We are launching a new website this spring which is currently on a beta sub domain and we are looking for the best strategy that preserves our current search rankings while throttling traffic (possibly 25% per week) to measure results.
The new site will be soft launched as we plan to slowly migrate traffic to it via a load balancer. This way we can monitor performance of the new site while still having the old site as a backup. Only when we are fully comfortable with the new site will we submit the 301 redirects and migrate everyone over to the new site. We will have a month or so of running both sites.
Except for the homepage the URL structure for the new site is different than the old site.
What is our best strategy so we don’t lose ranking on the old site and start earning ranking on the new site, while avoiding duplicate content and cloaking issues?
Here is what we got back from a Google post which may highlight our concerns better:
Thank You,
sincerely,
Stephan Woo Cude
SEO Specialist
-
Hi there,
I was just reading this old thread to get some info, but I'd love it if you could share you actual results from the launch. What did you do and how much did traffic change? How long before you were back to normal?
I usually find that with a new website and all new URLs, I end up seeing maybe a month or sodip in traffic that can be up to 10%. But that seems to be less and less as time goes on. The search engines are usually on top of it though, they recrawl and recatalog quite quickly.
Would love to hear from you.
Thanks!
Leslie
-
Just to chime in on this, albeit maybe a little late now... I had the same thought as I was reading through this with using rel=canonical to point the old pages to the new for now, so the search engines don't have any duplicate content issues until a 301 redirect can take over when the new site is fully launched.
However, depending on your rollout schedule, this would mean that the SERPs would soon be indexing only the new pages. You'd need to ensure that the traffic diverter you are using would handle this. Otherwise you could put the rel=canonical on the new pages for now, which would avoid the duplicate content until you are fully launched. Then you'd remove it and 301 redirect the old pages to the new.
Just something you maybe want to think about! Hopefully your traffic diverter can handle this though.
-
Thank you very much for the insight!
-
Ah ok. I understand now. I wasn't picking up on what you were saying before.
If with the soft launch you are already putting the "new" version of the site on their intended final URLs then yes, you can let the engines start crawling those URLs. For each new URL you let the search engines crawl make sure to 301 its corresponding old URL (the old site) to the new version to minimize any duplicate content issues.
If for whatever reason you can't quite 301 the old URLs yet (like if you still need instant access to reroute traffic back to them) you could try using rel=canonical on the old pages and point them to their new counter part only if the main content on each of the pages is almost exactly the same. You don't want Google to think you're manipulating them with rel=canonical.
-
Sorry this is so confusing and thank you so much for your responses... there would be no subdomain when we do the soft launch... it would be http://www.sierratradingpost.com/Mens-Clothing.html (old site) vs http://www.sierratradingpost.com/mens-clothing~d~15/ (new site)...
-
As I'd said, there really isn't a reason to let them get a head start. The URL's will be changing when you transition the new site out of the subdomain (ie beta.sierratradingpost.com/mens vs sierratradingpost.com/mens - those are considered 2 completely different URLs) and the engines will have to recrawl all of the new pages at that point anyway.
-
We do plan to do that... it is just since we plan a soft launch we will essentially have 2 sites out there. We are wondering when to remove the noindex from the new site. We will have 2 sites for about a month... should we let the bots crawl the new site (new urls, same domain) only we we take down the old site and have the 301's or let Google crawl earlier to get the new site a head start on indexing.
-
And when you drop the sub domain you definitely want to 301 all of the old site structure's URLs to their corresponding new page's URLs. That way nothing gets lost in the transition.
-
We would drop the subdomain - so we would have 2 "Men's Clothing" department pages - different URLs, slightly different content...
-
Yeah, just refer to our conversation above as I think it will pertain better to your situation.
-
The only issue is that you have to keep in mind that Google/Bing defines pages on the internet through their URL's, not the content. The content only describes the pages.
So if you let the engines pre crawl the pages before dropping the subdomain - simply for the reason of letting them have a "sneak peek" - you won't really be doing yourself much of a favor, as the engines will just be recrawling the content on the non subdomain URL as if it were brand new anyway.
The reason to do it the pre crawl way would be if you're already building back links to the new beta pages. Then it could make sense to let the engines index those pages and 301 them to their new non subdomain versions later. In my opinion the benefit from this route would outweigh any potential duplicate content issues.
-
But the URL structer is different... does that matter?
-
What YesBaby is talking about is somehting like Google's Website Optimizer. When someone goes to sierratradingpost.com/mens-stuff, for example, it will give 50% of the people the old version of the site for that page, and the other 50% the new version. It will eliminate any duplicate content issues as the 2 page variations will still be attached to the same exact URL.
Definitely a viable option if it fits with your game plan of how you want to do things.
-
SInce all of the URLs except for the homepage - what do you think about letting the new site get crawled maybe 2 weeks before it is 100% launched? We would have some duplicate content issues but I am hoping this would give us a head start with the new site.... then when we go 100% we add the 301's and new sitemap. It is my understanding we will be dropping the sub domain for the soft launch.
Thank you so much!
-
First of all - I love the new design. It looks great!
The absolutel best way to go about it in my opinion would be to simply have the new site ready, and then launch it fully under the base domain (no subdomain) while 301 redirecting important old pages on the site to their related new versions. That way the search engine will have the easiest time of discovering the new site and indexing it, while making sure you don't lose anything in the transition via proper 301'ing.
I can't say it would provide you with a massive benefit to set up a way for the search engines to start crawling the new site for now, as you're just going to be moving all of those URL's off of the subdomain in the near future anyway - where they will then need to be recrawled on the parent domain as if they were brand new.
If the traffic diverter you have set up automatically 301's requests for old site pages to their new beta URL version then you might as well let those new versions be indexed for the time being. Just make sure that when you transfer the beta site to the parent domain that you 301 the old beta URL's to their new permanent home.
-
So with the service - the new site is not crawled until we launch it?
-
The new site is beta.sierratradingpost.com where we will be dropping the beta. On the old one has catalog departments... ie Men's Classics, which, at this time, are not being carried over to the new site. I guess we are wonding when we should allow the robots to crawl the new site?
-
Hey Stephan,
I'm assuming you want to measure how the traffic is converting on the new site, hence the strategy to send small portions of traffic to new pages?
If so, the easiest way might to just straight up A/B split test the new pages with a service like Adobe/Omniture Test&Target. This doesn't cause any cloaking/dupe isseues. When you are happy with the results you can realese the site with all the 301's in place.
-
Let me make sure I have this straight... you're not going to be directing the new site format to a subdomain permanently, right? You were only using the sub domain for beta purposes?
The way I see it, when I go to Sierra Trading Post's site now I can make out what looks like 2 different types of architecture structures. You have one link on the page pointing to Men's clothing which executes at a single defined .htm file. Then you can see that you have the "Men's Classics" (still general men's clothing?) which points to a directory which I'm guessing is your new site. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, or if I'm right but have the old vs. new reversed.
If that is the case your best bet to try and minimalize any ranking impact would be to 301 redirect pages from the old catalog architecture to the new. That way you could remove the old site files completely and let the server take care of the direction.
If you need to leave the old site up for throttling purposes like you said - you could use canoniclazation tags to refer the old pages to the new ones. That along with employing 301 tags would help train the search engines into understanding what you're doing.
I'm sorry if I didn't answer your question as you needed. I'm still not sure if I understood your issue as intended. =P
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Changing URL's During a Site Redesign
What are the effects of changing URL's during a site redesign following all of the important processes (ie: 301 redirects, reindexing in google, submitting a new sitemap) ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jennifer-garcia0 -
New Website Launch - what to do with the URLs of the pages with ranks
Hey there, So, we are "redesigning" our website, it will have a new user journey and overall layout, use, and feel. Situation: Previously, most of our keywords ranked over time organically though all of them pull up our domain.com as the landing page. Now that we are redesigning the site, most of the keywords pointing to the home page will now have their own page. Keywords properly grouped and content will now be on topic and focused per page. Q: What are the things that we need to do so we won't lose those keywords? Appreciate your help. Also, if you can cite specific SEO checklist when redesigning a site, that'll be a great help! Thanks! Jac
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jac.reyes0 -
How do I best handle a minor URL change?
My company is about to complete an upgrade to our website but part of this will be changing the URLs slightly. Mainly the .aspx suffix will be dropped off the pages that we're most worried about. The current URLs will automatically redirect to the new pages, will this be enough or will there be an SEO impact? If it helps the site is www.duracard.com and the product pages are the ones we want to keep ranked. For instance if someone searches for "plastic gift cards" our page '<cite>https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards.aspx</cite>' is #3 and we want to make sure it stays that way once we change it to 'https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards'. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Andrea.G0 -
Can URLs blocked with robots.txt hurt your site?
We have about 20 testing environments blocked by robots.txt, and these environments contain duplicates of our indexed content. These environments are all blocked by robots.txt, and appearing in google's index as blocked by robots.txt--can they still count against us or hurt us? I know the best practice to permanently remove these would be to use the noindex tag, but I'm wondering if we leave them they way they are if they can still hurt us.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
How do I get the best from our Blog and build quality links and drive traffic to our site?
We have recently setup a Wordpress focused blog (blog.towelsrus.co.uk) which is very much work in progress. Because of financial constraints we had to host this on a separate sub domain. I need to get to grips with blogs is new to me (only been doing SEO this for 3 months now) and have have read may posts on the forums here that this is one of the best ways to build links and engage the audience. How do I go about getting people to read my blog, and should I use this to pull in traffic on keywords we cannot through the main site or should i use this to re-enforce and build traction on those keywords we are trying to rank for on the main site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0 -
Lots of incorrect urls indexed - Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site
Hi, Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Basically, our rankings and traffic etc have been dropping massively recently google sent us a message stating " Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site". This first highligted us to the problem that for some reason our eCommerce site has recently generated loads (potentially thousands) of rubbish urls hencing giving us duplication everywhere which google is obviously penalizing us with in the terms of rankings dropping etc etc. Our developer is trying to find the route cause of this but my concern is, How do we get rid of all these bogus urls ?. If we use GWT to remove urls it's going to take years. We have just amended our Robot txt file to exclude them going forward but they have already been indexed so I need to know do we put a redirect 301 on them and also a HTTP Code 404 to tell google they don't exist ? Do we also put a No Index on the pages or what . what is the best solution .? A couple of example of our problems are here : In Google type - site:bestathire.co.uk inurl:"br" You will see 107 results. This is one of many lot we need to get rid of. Also - site:bestathire.co.uk intitle:"All items from this hire company" Shows 25,300 indexed pages we need to get rid of Another thing to help tidy this mess up going forward is to improve on our pagination work. Our Site uses Rel=Next and Rel=Prev but no concanical. As a belt and braces approach, should we also put concanical tags on our category pages whereby there are more than 1 page. I was thinking of doing it on the Page 1 of our most important pages or the View all or both ?. Whats' the general consenus ? Any advice on both points greatly appreciated? thanks Sarah.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SarahCollins0 -
Create new subdomain or new site for new Niche Product?
We have an existing large site with strong, relevant traffic, including excellent SEO traffic. The company wants to launch a new business offering, specifically targeted at the "small business" segment. Because the "small business" customer is substantially different from the traditional "large corporation" customer, the company has decided to create a completely independent microsite for the "small business" market. Purely from a Marketing and Communications standpoint, this makes sense. From an SEO perspective, we have 2 options: Create the new "small business" microsite on a subdomain of the existing site, and benefit from the strong domain authority and trust of the existing site. Build the microsite on a separate domain with exact primary keyword match in the domain name. My sense is that option #1 is by far the better option in the short and long run. Am I correct? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | axelk0 -
What is the best tool to crawl a site with millions of pages?
I want to crawl a site that has so many pages that Xenu and Screaming Frog keep crashing at some point after 200,000 pages. What tools will allow me to crawl a site with millions of pages without crashing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iCrossing_UK0