Issue with site redirects associated with a redesign

12 replies
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The company I work for acquired a site that we are currently redesigning. The site is a mess. They currently using a CMS and all urls are driven by parameters.

I did a crawl of the site and there are over 4,000 urls but only a fraction of these are real pages. The problem is that some urls have www and some don't. So there will be a version of the url:

www.domain.com/database/?item=644

and then another one like so:

domain.com/database/?item=644

I will be changing the url to be more SEO friendly and include keywords so my question is: do i need to redirect both the www and the non-www to the new url?

Thanks for advice!
#issue #redesign #redirects #site
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by strangeasangels View Post

    The company I work for acquired a site that we are currently redesigning. The site is a mess. They currently using a CMS and all urls are driven by parameters.

    I did a crawl of the site and there are over 4,000 urls but only a fraction of these are real pages. The problem is that some urls have www and some don't. So there will be a version of the url:

    www.domain.com/database/?item=644

    and then another one like so:

    domain.com/database/?item=644

    I will be changing the url to be more SEO friendly and include keywords so my question is: do i need to redirect both the www and the non-www to the new url?

    Thanks for advice!




    You need to answer these questions first:
    • Does the site currently have any ranked pages on Google Search?
    • Do any of the old URLs have followed backlinks?
    • Do any of the old URLs have any direct traffic?
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    • Profile picture of the author strangeasangels
      I've already mapped/redirected the top pages in Google search and all backlinks.

      These are pages that don't rank in Google, don't have backlinks but are part of the site nonetheless. A crawl yields over 4k pages and as I said only a fraction of these are real pages.

      I don't want to ignore them (not redirect to anyplace) if there are consequences to that.
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      • Profile picture of the author yukon
        Banned
        Originally Posted by strangeasangels View Post

        I've already mapped/redirected the top pages in Google search and all backlinks.

        These are pages that don't rank in Google, don't have backlinks but are part of the site nonetheless. A crawl yields over 4k pages and as I said only a fraction of these are real pages.

        I don't want to ignore them (not redirect to anyplace) if there are consequences to that.


        I wouldn't worry about it.

        If they don't rank, exist, have followed links or generate traffic then they don't contribute to the site for SEO or traffic.

        Why did you buy the site?
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        • Profile picture of the author strangeasangels
          I didn't buy it. The company I worked for did. I'm just managing site redesign.
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          • Profile picture of the author yukon
            Banned
            Originally Posted by strangeasangels View Post

            I didn't buy it. The company I worked for did. I'm just managing site redesign.
            Ok, what do they get out of buying the site?
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  • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
    First, you want to put in a redirect to either the WWW or non-WWW version of all URLs. That can be done in the .htaccess file.

    The reason you want to do this is because in the future if the site does attract any links or you work to build any, search engines such as Google see those both as two distinct URLs. It sounds stupid, but in the eyes of Google www.domain.com/somepage is a different URL than domain.com/somepage. A link built to www.domain.com/somepage will not benefit domain.com/somepage and vice-versa.

    Second, as Yukon said, if most of those pages are not "real" pages, don't exist in the Google index, and are not going to exist in the future, I would not worry so much about redirecting them all individually.

    Any that have good links pointing to them you want to save and redirect to preserve the power of those links.
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    • Profile picture of the author strangeasangels
      Thanks. Actually, no traffic comes to these pages via google (at least according to analytics) but they are still part of google's index I am assuming because when I site:// search there are over 4,000 results.

      Is www or non-www better in the eyes of the Google gods?
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by strangeasangels View Post

        Thanks. Actually, no traffic comes to these pages via google (at least according to analytics) but they are still part of google's index I am assuming because when I site:// search there are over 4,000 results.

        Is www or non-www better in the eyes of the Google gods?
        Neither is better. I would look at which one has more URLs in the Google index and which has the better links pointing at it. That's the one I would keep, and I would redirect the other.
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        • Profile picture of the author strangeasangels
          Is it somehow possible to find out all the urls being indexed by Google (without manually scrolling through all the results, who has time for that?). And I will need to redirect all of them since the urls are changing from parameter-based to keyword-based.
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          • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
            Originally Posted by strangeasangels View Post

            Is it somehow possible to find out all the urls being indexed by Google (without manually scrolling through all the results, who has time for that?). And I will need to redirect all of them since the urls are changing from parameter-based to keyword-based.
            I would probably use something like Scrapebox to grab all the URLs, download them into an Excel spreadsheet and then just sort them alphabetically. The WWW ones will show up in a group. Easy to figure out then.

            Second option, not as exact, but will take almost no time at all is to go here

            https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/

            Put both the WWW and non-WWW home page in there. See which has the higher Domain Authority (DA). DA is not 100% right, and I rarely would use it for anything, but for something like this it will most likely tell you which version is the more popular one.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    I'm still trying to figure why they want the site. It's a mess and no traffic. Must be a good domain name, that's all I can figure.
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    • Profile picture of the author strangeasangels
      It is and tons of content. It's just crap as far as architecture and optimization goes... I think they paid very little for it. They do get some traffic but not a whole lot compared to our other domain.
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