Would it be better to Start Over vs doing a Website Migration?
-
Hey guys /gals
I have a question please. I have a computer repair business that does extremely well in search and is on the front page of google for anything computer repair related.
However, I am currently re-branding my company and have completely redesigned every aspect of the UI and the SEO Site structure as well as the fact that I have completely written vastly different content and different title tag lines and meta descriptions for each page.
So basically when doing a migration we know that we want to keep our content, titles, headlines and meta descriptions the same as to not lose our page rank.
Seeing that I have completely went against the grain in all directions on a much needed company re-branding and everything is completely different from the old site is it even worthwhile 301 redirecting my old urls to the new ones that would (best) correspond with the new?
In the plainest English, would I do better at Ranking the New Website QUICKER without doing 301 redirects from the OLD to the NEW?
In an EXTREME instance like what I have done, would the Domain Migration IMPEDED me ranking the new site seeing how nothing is the same?
I have build a Rock solid SILO Site Architecture on the New site which is WordPress using the Thesis Framework and the old domain is built on JOOMLA 1.5
Thank fellas
Marshall
-
Hey thanks Keri and how are you?
-
Moz has recently had a little bit of experience with a rebrand, changing domains, changing URLs, implementing redirects, and a variety of other fun things to keep us busy. Ruth Burr, our in-house SEO, is giving a Mozinar that talks in-depth about this migration on Thursday, with a chance for you to ask questions at the end. If you're not able to attend the webinar, we'll have it online for download within two days.
You can reserve your spot at http://moz.com/webinars, as well as see all the past webinars we've done, and what else is scheduled in the future.
-
Hi Marshall,
one resource I think is very valuable regardless of if someone is new or have been doing it for long time this is a great search engine optimization is this guide please do not think that I am giving you this because I think you are a beginner I know you are not. And I agree with you Google has made things kind of nuts in the last 3 to 5 years.
http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
It is definitely the right place to start if you are just picking up after a couple years off.
Sincerely,
Thomas
-
Thanks gents and figured as much.
I had to ask though. Although I am very good at SEO and coding and everything else, that means moot if you are not current with the recent GOOGLE drama that has been punishing everyone for the last 2 years now.
3-5 years ago, I could build a site and rank it on the first page for pretty much everything without even doing any back link building but...once again.. we are talking 5 years ago when things were a lot different and a lot less harder too.
Never hurts to ask the folks that do this stuff for their primary source of income know what I mean fellas?
Thanks once again to all of you for your responses to my question.
Sincerely,
Marshall : )
-
Just like the 2 suggestions, it's really best to keep both sites. Move forward with the new site and re-brand your company but don't scrap the original website. Add a banner, write up, some news explaining the re-brand and point the original site to the new site. You'll create a backlink and if the person is genuinely interested in what you have to offer, they'll follow to the new website.
301 any page that are relevant from the original site to the new site. If both sites have a products page then you can point it over. Google will naturally figure out what you did and start passing any relevant benefits to the new site.
-
Hi Marshall,
You're rebuilding your current website in WordPress using thesis framework. And you're asking basically if you you should do 301 redirects or not?
Absolutely you should do 301 redirects if you want to keep any part of your rank which sounds like it is doing pretty good. I would feel when redirect every page to the new page that has taken it's place. Also for word press I would strongly recommend using manage WordPress hosting
WP engine, zippykid, web synthesis, and Pagely are excellent choices.
I hope I've been of help,
Thomas
-
Please...dear God don't scrap your website (especially if you are ranking well for it). Even if the content is completely different, figure out where to redirect your legacy pages to and use 301 redirects. Just make sure that you are doing one to one redirects to maintain as much of your link equity as possible. Sorry for such a short and simple response to your long question, but this only required a simple answer. If you are offering the same products or services create a massive .htaccess file and redirect the hell out of your old site.
You owe me a Coke.
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
-
Backlink (which one is better)
Hi, for guest posting which Anchor is better for my brand website? 1)Naked Anchor text (e.g according to www.example.co.uk) OR Branded Anchor text? (e.g according to Example, which can be clicked to www.example.co.uk ) Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KINSHUN0 -
Site Migration - Pagination
Hi, We are migrating our website and an issue we are facing is how to handle paginated content in our categories. Our new website will have the same structure but with different urls. Should we 301 redirect all the paginated content (if crawled by Google) to the url of the main category? To put this into an example: Old urls: www.example.com/technology/tvs (main category of TVs & also page 1) ** www.example.com/technology/tvs?v=0&page=2 ** ( page 2 of TVs) New urls: **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs **(main category of TVs & also page 1) **www.example.com/soundvision/tvs?page=2 **(page 2 of tvs) Should we redirect all of the old TV urls (also the paginated) to www.example.com/soundvision/tvs ? The is no rel next, prev tag in our site and no canonicals. Also there is a view all products page in each category, BUT it doesn't contain all the products(max. is 100 per page - yes the view all page is also paginated). The same view all products page (paginated) will exist in the new website also. I checked google search console, and Google has decided to treat as canonical page the first page www.example.com/technology/tvs . Also, all the organic traffic of our categories goes to these pages (main category page - 1st page). I would appreciate any thoughts on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HellasSITES0 -
Consolidating product pages during website migration
Hello, We are an e-commerce & content site undergoing a website migration and redesign in the coming months. We will be getting an entirely new website. Many of our URLs will be changing: Current URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/product-title-here
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katelynroberts
Future URL setup: www.mysite.com/catalog/product-title-here So we're aware we will be using plenty of 301 redirects to achieve this. Further to this though, we currently have a product page for each configuration of a product - for example, a single-sided bookmark has its own page and URL, and the double-sided version of the same bookmark has its own page and URL. In our site redesign, we are hoping to consolidate each of these instances into one product page where users can select single or double-sided and the price will update accordingly. The bookmark URLs would then go from:
_www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU12345/bookmark-single-sided _(call this URL A for simplicity)www.mysite.com/catalog/SKU67890/bookmark-double-sided (call this URL B) To (after migrating to the new URL structure for the new site, and the now-consolidated single- & double-sided product pages):
www.mysite.com/catalog/bookmark (call this URL C) What is the best way to make this transition without losing too much of our SEO value? I understand there is nearly always traffic loss with URL changes but I'd like to at least minimize the damage as best I can. We have backlinks and ranks for many product pages so I want to make sure we pass as much of this as we can. (And is this at all further complicated by the fact that URL A & B won't exist on the new site, and URL C doesn't exist on the current site? Does this impact the use of the 301 redirects and if so, how?) Are we better off to approach this page consolidation after the site migration and treat it as a separate project? This is something that is important to our user experience, and is definitely a change we want to make. Any advice is appreciated - thank you! I'm a fairly beginner-intermediate SEO so this is all somewhat new but I want to be able to at least convey some understanding to our developer of what we need to do. I was able to find this discussion (https://mza.seotoolninja.com/community/q/merging-pages-and-seo) which describes a similar situation and solutions if we were just consolidating the pages but doesn't quite have the complicating factor of the entire site migration happening at the same time. Thanks so much!0 -
Migration developer question
Hi Guys, We are in the process of migrating our website and are moving to: AWS/Elastic Beanstalk hosting and the only way to do a custom domain with a third-party (not Amazon) DNS Service is by setting up a CNAME that points to the EBS Instance. Do you think this will impact SEO performance in any way? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cerednicenko0 -
Title Length Vs Keywords
Hello all, I've been talking with an SEO expert who convinced me to add more keywords to my titles of a section of our site which is updated with products daily. I can see the logic and I do prefer having these additional keywords. The problem now is in Moz it says we have over 2,000 pages with title elements that are too long, which is true they are all over the 70 character limit. Is this a problem SEO wise? Speaking to our SEO expert they said it's not ideal from a user point of view as you can't see the full title, but are we going to be upsetting Google by having 150+ character titles? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HB171 -
Why is our website not generating organic traffic?
Our website is struggling to generate organic traffic over the past few months and we're lost as to why. It's a relatively new site. It's mobile friendly, all products have meta descriptions and product images have alt tags. Content is added regularly. Site speed could be better and alt tags need to be added to images on the blog but other than that we're stumped. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Johnny_AppleSeed0 -
Website (.BE) showing up in .NL SERPS
Fellow mozzers, we need your help We have a situation where a customer has two websites for each country: flowtracksurf.be → Belgium flowtracksurf.nl → Netherlands They used to have very good keyword rankings in the SERPS in BE & NL. Flowtracksurf.nl had good rankings in Google.nl and Flowtracksurf.be in Google.be.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jacobe
Recently there has been a change: Flowtracksurf.nl is not showing up in Google.nl anymore. It also seems that all the rankings from flowtracksurf.nl have been switched to flowtracksurf.be. .BE is doing very well, .NL is suffering. Data shows us that .NL : In the first two weeks of december 2014, we see a massive drop in traffic (GA) In that same week(s) we see a drop in search queries (Webmaster Tools) We see the exact opposite in .BE (growing strong in those weeks) When we look at the cache of flowtracksurf.nl we see only reference to flowtracksurf.be. Is that a hint of what was going on? On the same date that we see a massive drop in traffic on .NL, we see a peak in 'indexation' of .BE We see that the MOZ pages crawled dropped in that same week for NL We're also seeing that all the traffic from Google.nl is now going to flowtracksurf.be. Some keywords we were scoring #1-2 for are: surfvakanties, surfvakantie, surfcamp mimizan, surfcamp, frankrijk, surfcamp spanje, surfen frankrijk We just can't figure out the hard evidence in the data.
Can you help us on that?0 -
Looking for help with my website
Hi does any one know of a good seo company that will get results, i.e., fix site issues and get the site improving in the serps.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Taiger0