Website redesign, some urls are no longer available. How do I mitigate ranking drops?
-
I am currently refreshing my WordPress business website. I used a theme that had a built in portfolio option. I wanted to strip down the bloat and move to something more simple to better articulate my message.
Upon switching themes I will loose my urls for my portfolio projects. I should have never used this built in function but it did exactly what I needed and wanted here is an example.
Now on my staging site these portfolio pieces have vanished and the urls are indexed with google. I could create posts and recreate the portfolio pieces however the problem with the url is the /portfolio-view/ portion. I cannot recreate the part of the url. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I receive some traffic through the portfolio pages but not much, however, I do not want to loose any traffic.
I am looking for a strategy that will solve this url issue with WordPress. I have about 10 separate portfolio pages with this url issue.
-
Yay! Awesome!
-
I just installed the plugin you recommended. This is exactly what I am looking for. Thank you!
-
Thank you so much for the advice
-
It's been awhile since I've used Redirection (the Wordpress plugin I mentioned) but you would just copy/paste it into a field there. There's no validation check for whether or not the page currently exists that I recall. Someone else lurking around this topic may be able to confirm that.
-
Rebecca,
I did not realize that. One last question how do I redirect a url that does not exist? I always used a redirect plugin. Is this something that needs to be done on the server? maybe htaccess file? Please excuse my lack of knowledge here, I have not run into a situation like this before.
-
You should still be able to do a 301. You just need to know what the URL was_, _even if it's not there anymore. In fact, you can 301 a URL that's never existed at all. It's basically just a note that says "we think the thing you're looking for is over there".
-
Hi Rebecca,
Sounds easy but for some reason when switching themes the portfolio urls completely disappeared.
I tried looking for it on my staging site. http://dsilvernail.staging.wpengine.com/portfolio-view/central-jersey-claims-association-wordpress-consulting/ it 404's How could I do a redirect on a url that no longer exists? The custom post type disappears completely too. Is there a way to add the /portfolio-view/ to a new url so I can just create them.
I am afraid I will have to code into my new theme the full portfolio option from my old theme.
-
I would recreate the portofolio URLs on the new theme with the new URL structure, then 301 the old URLs to the new ones. You can do the 301s pretty easily on Wordpress with the Redirection plugin.
If you don't want to recreate the portfolios, just 301 the old URLs to the most relevant page on the redesigned site.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Why is my website not ranking for it's brand name in SERPs but has been indexed by Google?
The website https://christchurch.crowneplaza.com has been live for a couple of months but is not being found in Google search results - even when searching for it's own brand name 'crowne plaza christchurch.' Google has indexed the site - but we are still not showing - https://www.google.co.nz/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fchristchurch.crowneplaza.com&rlz=1C1NHXL_enNZ735NZ735&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58j69i59l2j69i65.896j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 Any ideas as to why? I think it may be because their are two versions of the site, http and https, both with their own rel=canonical tags. Could this be the cause? Any help much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Timmy30 -
Website Redesign - Duplicate Content?
I hired a company to redesign our website.there are many pages like the example below that we are downsizing content by 80%.(believe me, not my decision)Current page: https://servicechampions.com/air-conditioning/New page (on test server):https://servicechampions.mymwpdesign.com/air-conditioning/My question to you is, that 80% of content that i am losing in the redesign, can i republish it as a blog?I know that google has it indexed. The old page has been live for 5 years, but now 80% of it will no longer be live. so can it be a blog and gain new (keep) seo value?What should i do with the 80% of content i am losing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CamiloSC0 -
Help! Rankings dropping after optimising
I have been using MOZ a lot, in the past I have always been able to optimise a website enough to rank well in my local areas, but lately every time I optimise a website based on MOZ recommendations the rankings are just dropping and dropping... I haven't focused any efforts on backlinks, but a few sites have gone from the first page of SERP to 2nd and continue to drop... I have 2 example sites: https://www.documentmanagementsoftware.com.au/ - optimised for "Document Management Software" - was initially ranked no.7 in google AU, now it is no.16 after my efforts. http://www.tmphysio.com.au/ - optimised for "canberra physiotherapy" - was no.6 now it is dropping to no.9 after 'optimisation' Any help or insights would be extremely helpful as I feel hopeless!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thinkLukeSEO0 -
Changing URLS: from a short well optimised URL to a longer one – What's the traffic risk
I'm working with a client who has a website that is relatively well optimised, thought it has a pretty flat structure and a lot of top level pages. They've invested in their content over the years and managed to rank well for key search terms. They're currently in the process of changing CMS and as a result of new folder structuring in the CMS the URLs for some pages look to have significantly changed. E.g Existing URL is: website.com/grampians-luxury-accommodation which ranked quite well for luxury accommodation grampians New URL when site is launched on new CMS would be website.com/destinations/victoria/grampians My feeling is that the client is going to lose out on a bit of traffic as a result of this. I'm looking for information or ways or case studies to demonstrate the degree of risk, and to help make a recommendation to mitigate risk.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moge0 -
How much does "Sud-domain SEO optimisation" improves website ranking?
Let's say there is a website(domain) and couple of sub-domains (around 6). If we optimise all sub-domains with "keyword" we want our website to rank for.....like giving "keyword" across all page titles of sub-domains and possible places which looks natural as brand mentions. Will this scenario helps website to rank better for same "keyword"? How can these sub-domains do really influence website in rankings? Like if the sub-domains have broken links, will this affect website SEO efforts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vtmoz0 -
301 Redirect Dilemma - Website redesign
Hi Guys, We are redesigning a clients ecommerce site. As part of the process, we're changing the URL structure to make it more friendly. I have put together a provisional 301 redirect plan but I'm not sure just how far I need to go with it. So far I have extract all the pages from the existing site that Google Webmaster Tools says have links pointing at them - this totals 93 pages. I have matched each page like for like to the new website structure. My next step was to pull the landing pages report from Google Analytics, I have extracted the pages that received entrances over the last 6 weeks. This totals 553, less the redirects I have already done and cleaning up some Google Translate pages I have circa 410 pages left. Many of these pages has more than 1 URL pointing to that page. I'm debating how important it is that that all of these remaining 410 pages have individual redirects set up for them one by one. I have to rule out regex because there is no pattern that makes sense given that I have already set up redirects for the first 93 pages that have external links. My question therefore is how important are 301 redirects on pages that have no external links and receive less than 10 entrances over a 6 week previous period? Do I need to 301 every single product on the old site to it's corresponding page on the new site? Also, I'm not sure how to treat pages that have mutliple URL's on the old site, the existing URL structure is such a mess that in some instances I have 5 URL's for one product page? I could feasibly create 5 seperate redirects but is this necessary? Also what about speed considerations, the server is going to have to load these redirects and it may slow the site down. I'm sitting at 100 odd so far. Any answers are most appreciated. Thanks Derek.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pulseo0 -
URL strategy mobile website
Hello everyone, We are facing a challenging decision about where our website (Flash Gaming website) is going. We are in the process of creating html5 games in the same theme of the flash games that we provide to our users. Now our main concern is to decide how to show this new content to the user? Shall we create brand new set of urls such as : http://www.mydomain.com/games/mobile/kids/ Or shall we adapt the main desktop url : http://www.mydomain.com/games/kids/ and show the users two different versions of the page depending on whether they are using a mobile device (so they see a mobile version) or a pc/laptop (so they a see desktop version). Or even redirect people to a sub-domain : http://m.mydomain.com/ The main idea we had is to keep the same url structure, as it seems that google is giving the same search results if you are using a mobile device or not. And creating a new set of urls or even a sub-domain, may involve a lot of work to get those new links to the same PA as the desktop URL that is here and know since a while now. Also the desktop page game should not be accessible to the mobile devices, so should this be redirected (301?) to the mobile homepage of the site? But how google will look at the fact that one url is giving 2 different contents, CSS etc, and also all those redirects might look strange... we are worried that doing so will hurt the page authority and its ranking ... but we are trying to find the best way to combine SEO and user experience. Any input on this will be really appreciated. Cheers,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | drimlike0 -
Competitor purchased thousands of hidden links to our website... will it hurt rankings?
A competitor has allegedly purchased a site wide HIDDEN link on a property that links to our website. Would this link hurt our rankings? Requests to the site to remove those links didn't go well -- they state they can legally link to any site they like and are not going to remove those links. Technically speaking, this is what the link looks like in their html: Our Primary Keyword The thousands of hidden links from this website will now vastly outnumber our existing backlinks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nick_Seo_Moz0