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VIQ - very important question

by clock
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I am forced by the customer to change their current site to Wordpress from Joomla ( personally I don't mind - makes life easier for me)

Now for the VIQ

At the moment, there are no backlinks pointing to anything other than the domain name - no sub pages.

Am I correct in saying that Redirects are not needed??

How will SEO be affected - if any at all??

Input here would be appreciated
#important #question #viq
  • Profile picture of the author Ben Holmes
    I did something similar, moved a site from Drupal to Wordpress. Backlinks aren't the concern, the SERPS are.

    What happens when someone searches for "purple elephant miniatures", and the page on your site that *used* to be sitting on the first page of Google for that search now has a new URL?

    404 page heaven...

    So use a redirect plugin, or simply list 'em all as 301 redirects in your htaccess file.

    That way, everything is seamless, and you don't lose any Page Rank, or SERP positions.

    P.S. Take the time to create good SEO'd URL's while doing the move... using keywords related to the post...
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    • Profile picture of the author clock
      Originally Posted by Khadaji View Post

      What happens when someone searches for "purple elephant miniatures", and the page on your site that *used* to be sitting on the first page of Google for that search now has a new URL?
      Point is this - all the backlinks anchor text are to the main page of the domain - no sub pages

      Does your argument still hold true?
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      • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
        Originally Posted by clock View Post

        Point is this - all the backlinks anchor text are to the main page of the domain - no sub pages

        Does your argument still hold true?
        Forget backlinks for a minute.

        Are any of the internal pages ranking for their keywords? Are people finding any of the internal pages without hitting the home page first?

        If so, you should probably do redirects.

        Of course, the other solution is to keep the actual tree structure of the site and the file names the same. example.com/subdirectory/pagename.php is the same url regardless of the platform used to serve it, right?
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        • Profile picture of the author Ben Holmes
          Originally Posted by JohnMcCabe View Post

          Forget backlinks for a minute.

          Are any of the internal pages ranking for their keywords? Are people finding any of the internal pages without hitting the home page first?

          If so, you should probably do redirects.

          Of course, the other solution is to keep the actual tree structure of the site and the file names the same. example.com/subdirectory/pagename.php is the same url regardless of the platform used to serve it, right?
          I see that John understood my point.

          Internal pages can be ranked on the first page of Google, and be drawing you traffic for some long-tail keywords... it doesn't matter if they aren't backlinked.

          It's that position in the rankings that you want to preserve, and will certainly fail to do when you change from one CMS to another (mainly because the URL will almost certainly change)

          But by doing 301 redirects, you're saving your place in the SERPS - and if a particular webpage deep within your site is driving traffic because it happens to be ranked on the first page of Google (despite a lack of backlinks), you don't want to lose that ranking.

          When I switched my site over, I very carefully watched the stats for a day before, and the days after... and was relieved that I didn't lose any traffic (it's a site that gets about 5,000 visitors a month)
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