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
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
-
What do you do with product pages that are no longer used ? Delete/redirect to category/404 etc
We have a store with thousands of active items and thousands of sold items. Each product is unique so only one of each. All products are pinned and pushed online ... and then they sell and we have a product page for a sold item. All products are keyword researched and often can rank well for longtail keywords Would you :- 1. delete the page and let it 404 (we will get thousands) 2. See if the page has a decent PA, incoming links and traffic and if so redirect to a RELEVANT category page ? ~(again there will be thousands) 3. Re use the page for another product - for example a sold ruby ring gets replaces with ta new ruby ring and we use that same page /url for the new item. Gemma
Technical SEO | | acsilver0 -
Spammy structured data for http://www.heritageprinting.com/ might be dropped from search results
We received the above message, which I'm see may also have. Before I go making hours of edits can someone give me an opinion on what may need fixed? Here's a link to one of our products: http://heritageprinting.com/products/step-and-repeat.phpAll products are uniquely marked upIt may be the $ dollar sign, but I'm not certain.Looking at WMT > Search Appearance > Structured Data, I see no errors for Schema Markup. TY in advance :)KJr
Technical SEO | | KevnJr0 -
Can You Use More Then One Google Local Rich Snippet on a single site/ on a single page.
I am currently working on a website for a business that has multiple office locations. As I am trying to target all four locations I was wondering if it is okay to have more then one Local Rich Snippet on a single page. (For example they list all four locations and addresses within their footer and I was wondering if I could make these local rich snippets). What about having more then one on a single website. For example if a company has multiple offices located in several different cities and have set up individual contact pages for these cities, can each page have it's own Local Rich Snippet? Will Google look at these multiple "local rich snippets" as spaming or will they recognize the multiple locations and count it towards their local seo?
Technical SEO | | webdesignbarrie1 -
SEO Issues
Hi, We have created a moving cost calculator tools and other moving company can added this tools their website. This is the code: [ <iframe src="http: www.enakliyat.com.tr="" fiyat-hesapla.aspx"="" height="554" width="400" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="border:none;"> ] when the other moving company added this code their websites, tool also works on the site and the tool make the referrals traffic our site.** Is it right using this method?**</iframe src="http:> http://www.enakliyat.com.tr/evden-eve-nakliyat-fiyatlari-hesaplama/ here is the tool
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
SEO for mobile
Hey everyone! I had just finished building my first mobile website and i wanna focus on SEO for mobile search. Now, since there is a redirection once a visitor enter to the web domain to the mobile site automatically (e.g. sample.com to m.sample.com). Question is: Where should i refer my back links to to improve my ranking on mobile result page? Would love for some help..
Technical SEO | | Tit0 -
SEO impact of adding a forum module to a site
I help maintain a site and the owners want to start a forum for their club members. This is a site that runs on Joomla, so it's likely we'll use some form of a Joomla module to add the forum functionality. My main question is whether there is anything to be concerned about for SEO purposes when adding the forum. I've never set one up, so I don't know the best practices for forums/discussion boards (although I'm scouring the web for general info). Should it be a subdomain or on the main domain -- or does this not matter? Are there any general setup processes that I should pay attention to for SEO best-practices? This question was mainly about the SEO impact, but if anyone can point me in the direction of forum best practice info as well, It would be appreciated. Cheers!
Technical SEO | | kariel
Kristy0