Impact of website redesign when changing to wordpress
-
Agency designed website and not sure what platform was used. Are now working minor redesign of site but wants to do so in word press. I don't have any problem with word press but don't want to start over ranking for key phrases. I don't want to change URL from mysite.com for the home page. What is the right way to make sure this is done correctly. I could not find a resource on the site. I don't mind researching this but am not sure what to search for to find info. Thanks
-
Many thanks Ryan.
-
An example would be on an Apache server with mod-rewrite enabled
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]The above 3 lines of code would be placed in the .htaccess file on the old web server. Replace the newdomain URL with the actual address of your new domain.
An excellent page which I would suggest bookmarking: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
-
"A regex expression would need to be written to map the old urls to the new ones" I was interested in knowing about this. Thats why i asked the question.
-
I am not entirely clear on your question and I am not a regex expert. I muddle through and get the job done as needed.
Basically you would write the code based on the old URL and the new URL. The expression says to replace www.oldsite.com with www.newsite.com in any URL.
-
Thanks. What would be the regex expression if i were ro redirect 25 pages to new site, without changing the extension and the site is on Apache server. Will regex expression take care of redirecting to multiple pages ( 25 in this case )
-
In a worst-case scenario, yes.
A regex expression would need to be written to map the old urls to the new ones. Depending on the changes made to the URLs, a single expression can cover multiple or even all URLs.
-
Hi Ryan,
"Option 3 - If your URL structure is changing, then each page from the old site would need to be 301 redirected to the new URL."
Supposing there are 25 pages in the old site, then shall we have to mention each page in .htaccess file for redirection.
-
Thank you for clarifying Alan. The solution depends on your migration plan.
Option 1 - If you are keeping the same domain name (mysite.com) and your URL structure remains the same, there is absolutely nothing you need to do. You are replacing your old page code with new WordPress code.
Option 2 - If you are moving to a new domain (newsite.com) then your web pages should be 301 redirected to the most appropriate page on the new site. If the URL structure is remaining in tact, this redirect can be made with a single command.
Option 3 - If your URL structure is changing, then each page from the old site would need to be 301 redirected to the new URL.
The redirect will ensure 90%+ of your page's link value is retained. Depending on the popularity of your site it may take a month for Google to reindex all of your site's pages. During that time some results may bounce in search results. Once a month has past, your pages should settle to around where they were before.
Normally a site change like this is done to improve the site in some aspects. The improvements from the change should offset the minor loss of link juice.
I would also share it is important to have experienced, competent developers working on your site. I have seen migrations which were outstanding, and others which were so bad the entire site needed to be completely reworked from scratch. You should obtain a detailed analysis of the quality checkpoints for your new site.
Good luck.
-
Sorry for the lack of clarity. I am not an seo. I just try to keep up with the topics a little bit so as,owner, I can make sure we are maximizing search spending. My question is when the new site goes up, what happens to the old pages that the google bots have indexed and made assessments regarding ranking. So based on links etc to those old pages there is a certain ranking for words that we are making to the 1st page and that I don't want to move down 40 or 50 slots because it is a new page. So, is there any thing I need to make sure that the design agency does regarding the old pages to make sure that any rankinking juice or whatever transfers to the new corresponding redesigned page. I don't want google sending people to the old pages but the new while i want those new pages to step into our 1st page slot. Does that make sense. Should we use redirects? Or is that not necessary?
-
Hi Alan.
I would like to help but am really unclear on exactly what you are asking. I understand you are migrating a site from an unknown platform to WordPress.
I don't understand what you mean when you say "but don't want to start over ranking for key phrases."
You can definitely keep your mysite.com URL for your home page with WordPress.
If your questions are specific to WordPress, I would recommend asking on wordpress.com or wordpress.org sites. There are several SEO plugins specific to WordPress which can help manage URLs. Yoast is a very popular one.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
No-index or 301 - custom wordpress archives
Hi, We are using custom wordpresss posts to showcase different services we provide, these are then grouped within custom archives. These custom archive pages are our main keyword landing pages and traffic generators (although ranking is fairly average). It's come to my attention that these custom posts have also been listed in the wordpress standard categories, with an identical title, excerpts and near identical urls as the custom archives. This appears to have been the case for quite a while. We are concerned that this is may causing duplicate content issues and unsure how to proceed. We have been advised to simply no-index the redundant 'standard' categories but as they have been indexed for some time we are cautious of causing any upset with search engines (although the categories are indexed they are not ranking for any major keywords) Are we best 301ing the redundant category to the custom archives or using a canonical tags or simply no-indexing the categories like other archive pages? Any advice is aprreciated Many thanks BC
On-Page Optimization | | benct0 -
Google index new data from my website page
Hi All, We have pages which are created few weeks before hand for Movie reviews in those pages we add value with adding the Movie cast and crew info and what ever info possible before the movie releases. The the movie releases we watch the movies and write reviews which is 500+ words. Now the issue is the pages are indexed a week before... How can i have these review pages scanned immediately when i have the complete review as the review content is not indexed for 3 to 5 days and the first day or 2 is when its important for the reviews to be seen in Google. Regards
On-Page Optimization | | AlexisWithers0 -
Page/Website Structure
Hello again Mozzers, We have a category, lets call it widgets. Within widgets are about a hundred or so products. For usability my predecessor made the following layout Widgets Main Cateogry - Links off homepage - (no content just links to the 3 sub-categories)
On-Page Optimization | | ATP
- Widgets by Resolution
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 0.1 Resolution widgets
0.2 resolution widgets
- Widgets by Capacity
---- About 20 subcategories
eg. 1 capacity widgets
2 capacity widgets
- Widgets by Type
---- About 12 subcategories This was a major improvement from a userbility perspective as it made a very complex product range navigatable by the major features or basic type. However, as you can imaging we now have 60+ very similiar pages all displaying very similiar products a nightmare for SEO. It also isnt ideal for user navigation as it take too many clicks to get to the products. I propose the following fix, and i wanted your opinion. Widget Main Category - Link from homepage (Consolidated with Widgets by Type)
-300 Words of content
-Links to the 12 Sub-type Catoregies (These are pages i can fill with content + products. This would give me a more ordinary structure of which I can focus each page to a keyword) The tricky part comes with incorporating the capacity and resolution options. 1 Browse Capacity Page
(20 sub categories all the same except capacity quantity & products)
1 Browse by Resolution Page
(20 sub categories all the same except resolution value & products) The owner want them, I was going to link from the main widgets page to each of these to give the customer the option. What I can't decide is how to deal with them from an SEO point of view. Should they be no-followed? canonicaled? Can there be any advantage to having so many pages covering slightly different variations or as i suspect it is dangerous to the overall health of the site. To complicate things further, Canonical tags may not be an option due to an old magento version running that doesnt support them. Is there an alternative way around? As always many thanks.0 -
I have lots of articles on my website. Should I add myself as the Author Rank for seo purposes
Hi All, We have lots of articles on our news page of our website. Should we add one of us as the author to gain Author Rank points so to speak ?.. Have not done anything previously with this but just wondered if we were missing a trick here thanks Pete
On-Page Optimization | | PeteC120 -
Wordpress category url problem.
I have set up wordpress categories but the permalinks are showing as www.mydomain.com/?cat=12 as opposed to the category name. The child categories though work fine and show as www.mydomain.com/category/chidcatgegory I've obviously got my permalink settings wrong somewhere. How do I fix this?
On-Page Optimization | | SamCUK0 -
Website in a frame
Following situation. Domain A is indexed at google , it use a frame within this frame a website is hosted from another domain. Because it not workes proper (all url's where only the main url from domain A) The webdesigner deleted domain A , the url's are delered from the google index. (some ranked well) (position 3) Now all url's from Domain B are in the index , but on a bad position (position 74) Now i want to move the website from domain A to domain B (and add a redirect 301) Will domain A gets his position in the google index B ? (All things happened 4 weeks ago) does anyone have other ideas how to get the position back ? Thanx in advance
On-Page Optimization | | digspinat0 -
Problem with Plugin: Wordpress SEO by Yoast
Hi Hi, I'm using the Plugin "Wordpress SEO by Yoast". Unfortunatelly, this plugin generates a sourcecode looking like this: name='description' content='XXXXXX.'/> Seomoz can't read this and tells me, that my pages have no description. Google doesn't matter and reads it correct. Is there anything I can do about this? Many greetings André
On-Page Optimization | | waynestock0 -
Can A Blog post impact negatively on Google rankings?
We used to rank fairly highly on Google for our preferred search term, but once we introduced a blog (or rather the blog excerps) onto our home page we dropped from page 1 to page 3 for our preferred search term. We have made the assumption this may be down to diluting of keywords and therefor the key phrase or message to the Search Engines was not as clear as it was before. Is this generally accepted as being the case ? If so - should each and every blog post excerpt start with the key seo search phrase to maintain the integrity of that search phrase ? or perhaps even better still is it best to have the blog on a dedicated page only with no excerpts on the home page ? We are using Wordpress and also using multiple categories within the blog - is it perhaps best to just have all blog postings on the one page and use TAGS more often? Thanksing you in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | kiswebsltd0