Tips on website redesign on site with messy URLs?
-
So I've inherited quite a messy website. It was in drupal and the owner wants it in wordpress. One of the problems is the link paths. Should I try to recreate them exactly? i.e. something/somethingelse/page/ or use redirects (which I'm not confident in doing).
Also, some of the pages end in .html, others in a back slash and others without slahes, there's no consistency.
Do you have any tips in general? I remember an older seomoz blogpost about successful website relaunches (with press releases and mass emails and stuff being sent out on launch to boot).
Thanks!
-
I'm never super-comfortable linking off Moz but if you want to, go Google
data-centric 404
You'll find a great post from SEL that talks about finding which 404 error pages to keep. I would apply a similar methodology to finding which "old" pages to keep and which to redirect generally or just let go.
-
Thank you for your answer Matt, I knew that you could set it easy enough in Wordpress but I was just curious if it's better to try to "accomadate" the old site URLs (It's super messy... because the guy used blog posts to make static pages as well) or if it's better to just make cleaner paths and do redirects instead?
I'm not comfortable doing redirects but I'm sure after reading through a few articles I'll feel more confident actually doing it.
-
Sure, you could recreate the /page/ paths pretty easily in Wordpress. When you set your permalinks, you can easily make those a page that ends with the slash. ie.
In Wordpress, that's as simple as creating the permalink to your new page as path. That becomes site.com/path/
For the site.com/path/index.html ones, 301 redirects should be simple enough.
Redirect 301 /path/index.html http://www.site.com/path/new-permalink/
I'm sure there's a way to ModRewrite that whole thing but I'd be careful not to "catch" the wrong links in that type of bulk work. It's probably easiest to create a sitemap, recreate what you can and figure out the rest from there.
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 google still crawling my old website pages?
Why is google still looking at my old indexed pages and not my new index. ? Why are they crawling my old website links when none of them are available? How do I overcome these problems?
Web Design | | optimalspaces0 -
Does loading content from an ajax url count as a bounce rate
Hi, Our current website http://www.luxresorts.com has sections that pull content through AJAX which is accessible through a URL. For example, on our homepage, we have a section called "LUX* Magazine THE TASTEMAKER", if you click on "Read More" it would open on the same page while pulling content from this URL: http://www.luxresorts.com/en/posts/lux-magazine. There are two concerns here: a. the above url does not contain any google analytics code, does pulling content from a url through ajax cause a bounce rate? b. since the url is indepenedent, the is no meta tags including title, description or even robot attributes. Should we treat this page as all other pages? Thank you for your help. Tej Luchmun
Web Design | | luxresorts0 -
What do you use for test rendering your dev site?
I'm redesigning our company ecommerce site and need to test render an infinite scroller to ensure that it is as SEO friendly as possible. My problem is that I cannot view it in Webmaster Tools since I am blocking the site from crawlers using robots.txt. I know I could simply unblock Google temporarily but I really would rather not make my dev site available to search engine crawlers.
Web Design | | bearpaw0 -
When Site:Domain Search Run on Google, SSL Error Appears on One URL, Will this Harm Ranking
Greetings MOZ Community: When a site:domain search is run on Google, a very strange URL appears in the search results. The URL is http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com:2082/ The page displays a "the site's security certificate is not trusted." This only appears for one URL out of 400. Could this indicate a wider problem with the server's configuration? Is this something that needs to be corrected, and if so how? Our ranking has dropped a lot in the last few months. Thanks,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Building a Mobile Site: Tools?
I've been tasked with re-building our company's mobile site and honestly have zero experience doing so. I know my way around HTML pretty well and have built several websites but never for mobile. Does anybody have any recommendations for me as far as tools to use to construct a proper mobile site? I basically want a simple page with four buttons on the front and a little drop down menu in the top corner. (not that this matters terribly but just saying, shouldn't need to be overly complicated.) Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | jesse-landry0 -
Site redesign and links?
I have a real estate website. On my sidebar I have about 16 links to pages on various neighborhoods. I templated my site using dream weaver so the same sidebar and links are on every page. I'm thinking of redesigning the sidebar and having one link that will take visitors to a page where all the neighborhood links will be and then from there visitors can choose whichever link to go to a specific neighborhood info page. I am doing this to clear space on my side bar for other content and links. What impact would this have on my home page? The website is bronxpad.com if anyone wants to check it out and provide feedback.
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Alternatives to Wordpress for updating content of a static html site
I have a static html site which I cannot update myself. What solutions/ programs would you recommend for gaining the ability to update it myself? I'm reluctant to switch to WordPress because the sites that use any CMS that are hosted by my web hosting company get routinely hacked. Thank you!
Web Design | | translate0 -
What are some on-pg recommendations for a flash resort site?
One of my clients want to be index for all their pages but I am afraid the website may have difficulty since it is all in flash. The website is a luxury brand for resorts. The website is me.graficode.com/preprod/ and currently has 6 main subfolers for resorts. Please let me know what recommendations will help me organically. It is hard to add content which will cause probelms for headers and keyword density.
Web Design | | Melia0