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Changing CMS -- Will it Affect Rankings?

by Shannon Tani
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
I have a site that I created back before I knew much about using a content management system and HTML. It's currently all in HTML. I'd like to change it over to something easier to manage, like WP, but I'm worried about losing my place in Google, which is quite high.

Can I make the switch with no negative effects?

Love,
Shannon
#affect #changing #cms #rankings
  • Profile picture of the author Louise Green
    You could 'archive' your html site and put a wp one on the side.

    This has worked well for me, I keep my existing rankings and have a new site to play with.
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    • Profile picture of the author togdil
      Originally Posted by Lovelylou View Post

      You could 'archive' your html site and put a wp one on the side.

      This has worked well for me, I keep my existing rankings and have a new site to play with.
      I didn't quite understand this. How to go about doing this. Could you please explain? This is because I myself am thinking of changing my html site to Drupal or some other CMS. I would also like to have some suggestions which CMS to use.

      Thanks in advance
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  • Profile picture of the author sebga
    i think you can keep the old pages,and install the new cms
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  • Profile picture of the author Jeff S
    Here are the steps we take when doing something like this (installing new CMS, switching from PHP->HTML, etc):

    1. Identify all pages indexed in Google for your website. If you have Webmaster Tools installed, you can get the pages from there. If not, simply go to Google and do a SITE seach (ex. "site www.yourdomain.com")
    2. Export the list of pages to a spreadsheet (Excel, Google Docs, etc) to make it easier to manage
    3. Assuming you're using Apache web server, you need to update your .htaccess with all the 301 (permanent) redirects. The syntax is:

    redirect 301 /oldpage.html newpage/html

    Make sure you do this for all the pages that Google has already indexed you (using a spreadsheet and CONCATENATE function in Excel makes it easier). Example for Excel:

    =CONCATENATE("redirect 301 ", A2, A3) ...where A2 is your old page, and A3 is your new page

    4. Update all those pages in the .htacess when you switch over to your new platform, and then you're all set

    We've done this on several occasions, and what tends to happen is you might see short-term impact (in theory you're not supposed to, but we've seen it a couple of time). In the end, you should come out exactly where you were before, but now on a new software platform.

    Hope this helps!
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