Very old site wanting a revamp - how to handle all the redirects/URL changes
-
Hi all,
I have a very very old site, that requires a facelift (going from an old clunky CMS to wordpress).
A problem I know I am going to face is that this site has a very poor URL structure (www.site.com/section/1/section/ etc) which I plan on cleaning up.
but how do I handle the 100+ backlinks this website has point to such links? If someone could point me in the direction of an article or such that would be great.
Thanks,
-
Hi Greenroads
This is a fairly simple thing to do.
1. Go to site:yousiteurl and see how many pages you have in Google - if there are only 100 or so they will all be listed. Put them in to a spreadsheet.
2. Use a backlink checker to identify any other pages that sites may be linking to you from. I use SEMrush but there are plenty of free backlink checkers where you can register and get free info (I just Googled https://monitorbacklinks.com/seo-tools/free-backlink-checker) Note all the backlink destinations.
3. Set up the new site and 301 all the old pages to relevant pages on the new website.There are various plugins that can help or you can edit the htaccess file yourself which is better for site speed. (Generally plugins slow the site)
There are plenty of guides on this but essentially you will just enter lines like this:
Redirect 301 /old page.com/old https://newpage.com/new
The full process is here:
https://wpbuffs.com/301-redirects-wordpress-htaccess/
Regards
Nigel
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
-
Are Old Backlinks Hurting Or Helping?
I have a ton of old backlinks for products that I no longer carry but I have redirected them to other pages within the site. I was told by an SEO expert that these links are hurting me rather than helping because people click on the links and then leave. These backlinks are from reputable blogs, news sources etc and my spam score is only 1%. Are these links really hurting me?
Link Building | | CatBoxer0 -
Should backlink URLs include www, https, or both???
My business is located at remotebaba.com, and I am wanting several sites to link to it.
Link Building | | udaipabla
I am only interested in home page at this point, and we are using HTTPS for our site. Which one of these should I have other sites link to (Please provide complete justification):
remotebaba.com (my root domain)
www.remotebaba.com
https://remotebaba.com
https://www.remotebaba.com I really appreciate your help!1 -
If i give a key word with a site . I want to know how many times that particular keyword repeated in that site ? Is there any tool for this ?
Any tool for finding a keyword or inbound links by crawling all links of a given website
Link Building | | inkrefuge1 -
How to Earn Links to Boring Pages on Your Site
We do great in earning links to our homepage, articles, linkbait, and resource pages but we get few links to our product pages which are honestly pretty boring. Do you have any advice for increasing links to these important "money" pages? (we are trying to add useful content to make them less boring and unremarkable)
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
Linking strategy between my own sites
Hi, I have one main site, let's call it food.com I also have 10 smaller sites, let's call them mexicanfood.com, indianfood.com, italianfood.com etc food.com is on its own separate dedicated server the 10 smaller sites are all on a shared IP in hostgator I don't want Google to think that I have created the 10 sites for only purpose of creating links to each other. So, would you recommend that all those 10 sites link to each other? or should there be no interlinking within those 10 same IP domains? What about linking from those 10 sites to my main site? How should I structure my own backlinks not to get penalized by Google ?
Link Building | | limens0 -
Link to my site not showing up in Open Site Explorer
If a link to my site on another domain does not appear in the list of links gathered by the Open Site Explorer, does that mean that this backlink will not be crawled by search engine bots? Is there anything I should do to make sure that this link IS crawled and/or recognized by search engines coughGooglecough?
Link Building | | robgleslie0 -
Site size affecting page rank?
I've noticed the sites that rank above me for certain phrases are much larger than I am. Here are the results of the 'site:' command for the top 6 results for a phrase I want to rank for (yes, I know that 'site' is not exact): 32,600 pages 8,760,000 pages (wikipedia) 684 pages 148 pages (domain name equal to search phrase) 1400 pages 120 pages (my site) Now, I appreciate that larger sites have more stuff to link to, and therefore have more juice flowing to them from external links. BUT, is it also true that they are generating lots of internal juice by having so many pages? I've looked at the PageRank algorithm and understand that the max page rank for a site (with no external links) is based on the number of pages of that site and how well linked they are). My question is: based on all the experts here, is number of pages in the site an important factor (assuming good on-page SEO), or does it really come down to number of external links (from relevant sites with appropriate anchor text, of course)? Can a small site with tons of external links rank above much larger sites? Has anyone beaten Wikipedia for a phrase they were targeting? How did you do it? Thanks!
Link Building | | scanlin0 -
Feedproxy Redirects - Do they pass link juice?
I use commentluv and all the links to my site when I leave a comment go through feedburner so that my URL's look like http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/SmallBusinessDoer/~3/yYrCkjbWq_4/ I used HttpFox in Firefox to see what was happening and it looks like a 301. I wanted to make sure that this is indeed passing link juice. Thanks!
Link Building | | gregalam0