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Upgrading Existing Well Established Website. What should I consider?

by hsharma
4 replies
Hi Guys,

I have a 10 year old well indexed and well established site. The time has come to upgrade the site as per recent times.

I have got a new website developed with all new pages, a completely new directory structure. Nothing similar to the old structure.

In the old site, there are a few important Page 1 ranking HTML pages. In the new site these pages do not exist. I know that when the search engines crawl and don't find the pages, they might bring my rankings down which could adversely affect my business.

The question is that what should be my strategy. Should I keep the old pages as they are and simply put some text on those pages saying that the new pages are located somewhere else OR should I make a 301 redirect OR should I make a redirect after 5 seconds saying that the page has moved and automatically take the user to the new relevant page?

Please help.

Regards
Harish Sharma
#established #existing #migrating existing site #upgrading #website
  • Profile picture of the author fdamours
    I would go for the redirect. But the best option would have been keeping a structure that enables the page to be on the same URL as before.

    Puting text and saying that it has moved would be a terrible idea. Just move them when a 301, if the page they get to is relevant to what they were searching then you shouldn't worry about warning them.

    301 redirect are everywhere, and we barely ever notice them.
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    • Profile picture of the author hsharma
      Originally Posted by fdamours View Post

      I would go for the redirect. But the best option would have been keeping a structure that enables the page to be on the same URL as before.

      Puting text and saying that it has moved would be a terrible idea. Just move them when a 301, if the page they get to is relevant to what they were searching then you shouldn't worry about warning them.

      301 redirect are everywhere, and we barely ever notice them.
      Hope it won't affect the search engine rankings for the indexed pages that have moved to new HTML page
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  • Profile picture of the author iAmNameLess
    LOL... what you're doing is why people end up calling me for SEO. Because you redevelop a website without properly doing it.

    Yes, it is going to KILL your search engine rankings to the point it will take months (if lucky) to get them back.

    A 10 year old website that is established and has ranking, and PR, it is pure idiocy to change the structure and the url destinations.

    Keep the SAME URL structure, if you don't say bye bye to your reputation, rankings, PR, and trust rank.

    301 redirects only give partial juice, and it DOES count as an error on the site. That's very bad.

    htaccess, modrewrite, overwrite whatever the extension is to the original .html and then create the same URLS. That's what you need to do, a new design isn't worth the loss in visibility.
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    • Profile picture of the author hsharma
      Thanks a lot. Information provided by you is pure gem.
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