Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
-
Hello Community,
What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss?
Thanks
-
Thank you all. 301 is definitely the plan. As Andy pointed out - to "predict" how Google will react to the change even with a comprehensive 301 effort is a miss and hit exercise.
-
As Andy/Steve were pointing out--the key is to as many redirects as possible (ideally all of them). On a large enterprise website this is extremely tedious and resource intensive and most people fall in the trap of just redirecting all pages that had more than x amount of visits in the last year. Unfortunately, the majority of your traffic is the long tail traffic that may be under this threshold and traffics drops after migration.
As for Organic rankings, there is a small decay factor using 301's.
-
Hi,
As I understand it you'll need to map all the old URLs to the New URLs with a set of 301 redirects.
This will tell google that the old page has permanently moved to the new location. You should get all the rank juice but I think you may loose a little.
Hope that helps
Steve
EDIT - I was writing my response while Andy was posting his...
-
The first thing to remember is to point all old pages to the new ones using 301's. Am I right in thinking that the basic content for each page will stay the same? If so, that is quite straight forward.
If you are removing pages altogether, then try to find the best matches for a redirect. Doing this should minimize any loss.
As to what Google will think, that is a little awkward to second guess. Sometimes there are no issues and the site will just carry on, other times you may see a drop or rise in the SERP's. No easy way to determine this.
Andy
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
-
Question regarding Site and URL structure + Faceted Navigation (Endeca)
We are currently implementing the SEO module for Endeca faceted navigation. Our development team has proposed URLs to be structured in this way: Main category example: https://www.pens.com/c/pens-and-writing/ As soon as a facet is selected, for example "blue ink" - The URL path would change to https://www.pens.com/m/pens-and-writing/blue-ink/_/Nvalue (the "N" value is a unique identifier generated by Endeca that determines what products from the catalog are served as a match for the selected facet and is the same every time that facet is selected, it is not unique per user). My gut instinct says that this change from "/c/" to "/m/" might be very problematic in terms of search engines understanding that /m/pens-and-writing/blue-ink/ as part of the /c/pens-and-writing/ category. Wouldn't this also potentially pose a problem for the flow of internal link equity? Has anyone ever seen a successful implementation using this methodology?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
How to rank a page on established site quickly
Hi, I'm looking for information about how I can rank an e-commerce category page quickly from a link building perspective. It usually takes me 6-12 months to rank these pages within the top 3 spots with link building, but I would like to get results faster. My site is established for more than 10 years and performs well in Google organic search. Here is what usually works over a 6-12 month time span: 15-40 links within articles on DA 15-60 sites, built within 6-12 months More than 75% of the links are from blogs Variety of anchor text Combination of follow/nofollow Deep links to product pages within the category we're trying to rank Might be important to note that it was easy for us to get category pages listed in DMOZ categories, when it was still around but it didn't seem to play any role in getting ranked faster. Note: We only build links on real sites with real traffic and decent performance metrics. No PBNs or other crap sites. I'd sincerely appreciate it if anyone can make any suggestions or point me towards helpful info. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Choice0 -
All URLs in the site is 302 redirected to itself
Hi everyone, I have a problem with a website wherein all URLs (homepage, inner pages) are 302 redirected. This is based on Screaming Frog crawl. But the weird thing is that they are 302 redirected to themselves which doesn't make any sense. Example:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alex_goldman
https://www.example.com.au/ is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/ https://www.example.com.au/shop is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses is 302 redirected to https://www.example.com.au/shop/dresses Have you encountered this issue? What did you do to fix it? Would be very glad to hear your responses. Cheers!0 -
When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jade1 -
Baffled by this site's inability to rank
Hi guys, I've been working on a site for quite a while and it has a really good link profile, excellent content, no errors or penalties (as far as I can tell) but for some reason it consistently ranks below a lot of thin poor quality websites with spammy EMDs and a few obviously paid links from old-skool business directories etc. It has a significantly higher DA and linking root domains that almost all of them. Also it just bounces around from #40 to #28 to#35 to #40 to #28 on a weekly basis for many of our primary keywords. There just seems to be no logic to this and it goes against everything I know and everything we're taught. (I should probably point out that I've been doing this quite a while and have a number of other sites ranking extremely well in quite a few different verticals), Has anyone ever experienced anything like this and what did you do? Before I throw in the towel it would be good to hear from others and try and understand why this happens and if there is anything else I can try to help my client and fix it. Many thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blaze-Communication0 -
Rankings appear mixed up causing huge drop in organic
Hi, Our top page appears to have dropped out of the index. The core keyword "business ideas" is still showing us at the top but it's a different post and it's lost all the long-tail. Whats even stranger is that it's not even directly relevant to the topic of business ideas. Looks like something fishy happened here – perhaps due to the recent algo updates. We've always seen a significant increase in organic when anything Panda related updates (c.20%+ growth every time) yet this has compeltely killed us. We spent a long time building this post up, eventually outranking Entrepreneur.com. It's been #1 for Google.co.uk for months. Any help would be MASSIVELY appreciated! ikvJVrq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | entrepreneurhandbook0 -
Safely change canonical URL many times
Hi, We are actually working on a new product information section for our network of websites (site A, B, C and D) where product landing pages allow to download information in pdf format and are active for downloads during a period of two months (active form for commercial reasons) with a unique URL (the case today). Here is a possible scenario for these product landing pages in the near future: Product is promoted in website A during 2 months (January to February) so canonical URL = A/page. Once expired, the product info. download form disappears. Customer decides to promote the same product in the same site A as well in site B from April to May so canonical URL will still be A/page. Canonical URL of B/page will point to A/page. Customer decides to relaunch his product promotion this time in site C from July to August so canonical URLs of pages A/page and B/page will now point to C/page as the latter will be the only product campaign active with a download form At the end of the year the customer does another campaign for the same product this time in website D so we will change the canonical URL of pages A/page, B/page and C/page to D/page as the latter will be the only product campaign active with a download form The obvious question here is: will this way of changing canonical URLs dynamically hurt the SEO of the section, pages, one particular website or the whole network ? Would it be better and safer to just keep the first canonical URL forever? A/page in this example Thanks so much for your input on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JulienLetellier0 -
URL structure + process for a large travel site
Hello, I am looking at the URL structure for a travel site that will want to optimise lots of locations to a wide variety of terms, so for example hotels in london
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | onefinestay
hotels in kensington (which is in london)
five star hotels in kensington
etc I am keen to see if my thought process is correct as you see so many different URL techniques out there. Or am i overthinking it too much? Lets assume we make the page /london/ as our homepage. we would then logically link to /london/hotels to optimise specifically for 'london hotels' We then have two options in my mind for optimising for 'kensington hotels': Link to a page that keeps /london/hotels/ in its URL to maintain consistency ie A. /london/hotels/kensington or should we be linking to: B. /london/kensington/hotels/ (as it allows us to maintain a logical geo-landing page hierarchy) I feel A is good as the URL matches the search phrase 'hotels in kensington' matches the order of the search phrase, but it loses value if any links find these pages with 'kensington' in the anchor text, as they would not really strengthen the 'kensington' hub page. /london/kensington Ie: i land on the 'kensington hotels' page and want to see more about kensington, then i could go from /london/kensington/hotels
to
/london/kensington quite easily and logically in the breadcrumb. I feel B. is the best option for now.. Happy to I am only musing as i see some good sites that use option A, which effectively pushes the location (/kensington/ to the end of the URL for each additional niche sub page, ie /london/hotels/five-star-hotels/kensington/) Some of the bigger travel sites dont even use folder, they just go:
example.com/five-star-hotels-in-kensington/ Comments welcome!!! Thanks0