Old directory site looking to convert to WordPress
Hey folks,
I need some advice with respect to moving an old static site to a modern CMS.
My wife and I bought a old directory site that was built in 2005 with FrontPage. It looks aweful, is painful to manually update (with Expressions Web) every time a new vendor lists on the service, BUT it has great SEO results for most of it's city-based pages. It ranks on the first page, and very often #1 for many of the keywords and cities that we are targeting. That's why we bought the business in the first place.
I'm investigating the option of moving the site to WordPress so updating the site becomes much more effortless and error prone. Since all of the old pages are created manually, I think it's going to be hard to reproduce the existing URLs. So I have a bunch of questions I would love to get answered.
1. Does anybody have any experience moving an old site to a modern CMS and if so, what were the SEO implications?
2. If my current page is /state-city-product.html and the new page is /state-city-product (without the .html extension), do I need to do a 301 redirect from the old to the new?
3. If the SEs consider the two pages in the previous question different, would I be well served to optimize the URL for the keywords? So instead of /state-city-product, I may want to change it to /product-city-state. In this example, the URLs aren't as closely mapped.
4. If I do an overnight switch from the old site to the new site, will Google and other SEs properly reindex my site?
5. My theory is that the old site does well because it is obviously updated manually (like DMOZ). Do SEs favor manually updated sites because there is a human moderator? If we move to a CMS whereby advertisers who list in the directory can automatically submit their listing and update their information, will we lose credibility with the SEs?
I think those are all the questions for now. I know I am new to this lively forum and haven't contributed to other threads so i do appreciate any and all feedback.
Thanks
I need some advice with respect to moving an old static site to a modern CMS.
My wife and I bought a old directory site that was built in 2005 with FrontPage. It looks aweful, is painful to manually update (with Expressions Web) every time a new vendor lists on the service, BUT it has great SEO results for most of it's city-based pages. It ranks on the first page, and very often #1 for many of the keywords and cities that we are targeting. That's why we bought the business in the first place.
I'm investigating the option of moving the site to WordPress so updating the site becomes much more effortless and error prone. Since all of the old pages are created manually, I think it's going to be hard to reproduce the existing URLs. So I have a bunch of questions I would love to get answered.
1. Does anybody have any experience moving an old site to a modern CMS and if so, what were the SEO implications?
2. If my current page is /state-city-product.html and the new page is /state-city-product (without the .html extension), do I need to do a 301 redirect from the old to the new?
3. If the SEs consider the two pages in the previous question different, would I be well served to optimize the URL for the keywords? So instead of /state-city-product, I may want to change it to /product-city-state. In this example, the URLs aren't as closely mapped.
4. If I do an overnight switch from the old site to the new site, will Google and other SEs properly reindex my site?
5. My theory is that the old site does well because it is obviously updated manually (like DMOZ). Do SEs favor manually updated sites because there is a human moderator? If we move to a CMS whereby advertisers who list in the directory can automatically submit their listing and update their information, will we lose credibility with the SEs?
I think those are all the questions for now. I know I am new to this lively forum and haven't contributed to other threads so i do appreciate any and all feedback.
Thanks
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