Site redesign/cleanup SEO Advice
-
Hi Everyone, New member here, but loving it. I have some questions that I couldn't find the answers to. We are radically changing our site. Over the years it has accumulated thousands of garbage files, WP installations, etc.
We enjoy good rankings for lots of our keywords.
Are there articles/advice/suggestions on how to do this with the least harm to our rankings?
One of the largest concerns is for pages currently ranked and we want to move them to blog posts with a preceding /blog/ in the url. The filename, title, etc. will all remain identical.
the url is www.wulongforlife.com
Sure appreciate any advice.
Thanks in advance.
-
Thank you Mark.
Wow, what a comprehensive response. I appreciate it.
I have also found some more info doing further research.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/should-i-change-my-urls-for-seo
I will continue to post info here as I find it.
-
Julia-
Good problem to have. I can provide you with some overall suggestions related to what you need to focus on as we have brought over 20+ wordpress sites this year that are in a similar situation. Good content; good ranking; need to clean it up but dont want to lose any seo value.....
Here are some of the most important items:
- Make sure you do an upfront XML sitemap audit so you know exactly what you have. This is your opportunity to reformat it if it needs it and make sure the site is set up correctly.
- Make sure you do a crawl of the site immediately prior to making any changes so you can use it as the benchmark for what you have today and to make sure you are improving in all areas. Make sure you understand everything that is being indexed and everything that isnt being indexed.
- You care the most about content that is being indexed. So make sure you focus on that content and conversion first.
- Make sure you back up the site in its entirety. If something weird happens, you want to be able to reinstall and start back at step 1.
- You want to make sure that as you move over pages that are currently ranked that you make as few changes as possible.....Keepng the url the same with the preceding blog is a good strategy......another option might be to leave the url structure exactly the same and doing a 301 redirect from the new url might be a solid solution if there is any impact to page ranking when you change the url by adding a preceding /blog/ in the url. (IMPORTANT NOTE: You will lose a small amount of linkjuice if you do a 301 redirect. It never transfers 100% of the linkjuice.)
- Make sure you challenge some of your wordpress plugins you are using. Many of the older plugins I have been using over the last 9 months, even though i continue to install updates, have been outdone by new plugins. This is your chance to make sure you have the best. (For example I use to use an old google analytics plug-in that was solid. The new google analyticator is much easier and has more functionality and provides me a dashboard view that is handy.)
- Make sure if you have pages that have backlinks that you bring them over with the same url structure or that you do redirects from the old to the new, so that you still get the link juice.
Hope this helps.
Mark
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
-
Can anyone tell me why some of the top referrers to my site are porn site?
We noticed today that 4 of the top referring sites are actually porn sites. Does anyone know what that is all about? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | thinkcreativegroup1 -
Site's IP showing WMT 'Links to My Site'
I have been going through, disavowing spam links in WMT and one of my biggest referral sources is our own IP address. Site: Covers.com
Technical SEO | | evansluke
IP: 208.68.0.72 We have recently fixed a number of 302 redirects, but the number of links actually seems to be increasing. Is this something I should ignore / disavow / fix using a redirect?0 -
No descripton on Google/Yahoo/Bing, updated robots.txt - what is the turnaround time or next step for visible results?
Hello, New to the MOZ community and thrilled to be learning alongside all of you! One of our clients' sites is currently showing a 'blocked' meta description due to an old robots.txt file (eg: A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt) We have updated the site's robots.txt to allow all bots. The meta tag has also been updated in WordPress (via the SEO Yoast plugin) See image here of Google listing and site URL: http://imgur.com/46wajJw I have also ensured that the most recent robots.txt has been submitted via Google Webmaster Tools. When can we expect these results to update? Is there a step I may have overlooked? Thank you,
Technical SEO | | adamhdrb
Adam 46wajJw0 -
Why are URLs like www.site.com/#something being indexed?
So, everything after a hash (#) is not supposed to be crawled and indexed. Has that changed? I see a clients site with all sorts of URLs indexed like ... http://www.website.com/#!category/c11f For the above URL, I thought it was the same as simply http://www.website.com/. But they aren't, they're getting indexed and all the content on the pages with these hash tags are getting crawled as well. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | wiredseo0 -
SEO friendldy Site structure?
we are in the process or rewriting all the pages on one of our sites and will be changing some urls around. i was just wondering if dashes or underscores are better in the urls SEO wise? www.site.com/word-word-word/ or
Technical SEO | | 858-SEO
www.site.com/word_word_word/ i personally like the underscores better but some colleagues tell me that dashes are better, any tests out there on this issue?? Thanks0 -
Best way to create a shareable dynamic infographic - Embed / Iframe / other?
Hi all, After searching around, there doesn't seem to be any clear agreement in the SEO community of the best way to implement a shareable dynamic infographic for other people to put into their site. i.e. That will pass credit for the links to the original site. Consider the following example for the web application that we are putting the finishing touches on: The underlying site has a number of content pages that we want to rank for. We have created a number of infogrpahics showing data overlayed on top of a google map. The data continuously changes and there are javascript files that have to load in order to achieve the interactivity. There is one infographic per page on our site and there is a link at the bottom of the infographic that deep links back to each specific page on our site. What is the ideal way to implement this infographic so that the maximum SEO value is passed back to our site through the links? In our development version we have copied the youtube approach implemented this as an iframe. e.g. <iframe height="360" width="640" src="http://www.tbd.com/embed/golf" frameborder="0"></iframe>. The link at the bottom of that then links to http://www.tbd.com/golf This is the same approach that Youtube uses, however I'm nervous that the value of the link wont pass from the sites that are using the infographic. Should we do this as an embed object instead, or some other method? Thanks in advance for your help. James
Technical SEO | | jtriggs0 -
Build links to / or without ./ on root
Hi there for linkbuilding what is better, building with / or without / www.domain.com www.domain.com/ I have been told it depends what your webserver is doing, also i was told they are the same? what does Google see? I know i need to stay consistent, just wondering which practice is better? Any help as always much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | pauledwards0 -
SEO advice when making a mobile site
Hi there, I'm current working on a site that is optimized for SEO and doing quite well in the rankings. We have noticed a big increase in mobile users to the site (mainly iOS and Android), so we have no started planning a mobile site as well. Do you guys have any recommendations we should keep in mind before we get started? One thing I'm still not sure of is whether we should aim to preserve all urls and cloak the pages (show mobile version to iOS and Android, and desktop version to everyone else) OR make a separate site for the mobile version (mobile.domain.com)? Would either solution affect the other? Regards,
Technical SEO | | KennethDreyer
Kenneth0