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Switching to CMS, Should I Say Bye to Serps?

by MaxTucker
4 replies
I have a popular website that gets about 2,000 uniques per day. The site is pretty much my bread and butter at the moment and it brings in quite a bit per year. This can most be attributed to the large user base and good search engine rankings. Up until now the site has been completely hand coded and managed. I have not used any CMS to streamline the site. It does have some wordpress blogs attached but all in all the site is not CMS based.

I am considering moving it to a CMS system so I can streamline everything and make my life easier. I was wondering, what are the SEO implications (especially serps) if I suddenly change from what I have now to a CMS? I will be using modx and the sites structure will remain mostly the same. So if I had a link mysite.com/page1.php the url's will remain the same.

So could I lose rankings or should I just switch?

I wouldn't really care normally but like I said this site is my bread and butter any large slip in serps could take a lot of money out of my pocket.
#bye #cms #serps #switching
  • Profile picture of the author JohnMcCabe
    Max, no guarantees on anything, but one of my sites has switched CMS a couple of times over its life. I went from hand-coded to Movable Type to Wordpress. I kept the file names the same, and didn't notice any drop in traffic.

    I wasn't worried much about any actual position - a search position never bought a thing, while the human visitors did.
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    • Profile picture of the author Michael Curran Smith
      As long as the URLs stay the same, you should see no drops with the switch. And if this makes the site better and easier to add value to then it's a good move.

      GM
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  • Profile picture of the author Ben Holmes
    You could actually improve your traffic, if your page URL's aren't keyword optimized, and you changed them to more accurately reflect the content.

    Then be sure to use a 301 redirect on all those pages, and your traffic will continue coming...

    Speaking from experience, I've done this myself.
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  • Profile picture of the author Jesus Perez
    You will see no change if the template, the URL, meta tags and content remain the same.

    Google can't tell the difference between a hand coded page or a database driven site. It just crawls HTML...the end results of both.
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