I have a couple of months old jewelry site which is showing some promise of being a nice visitor puller. It is already ranked top 10 in google for all its primary keywords and brings in more than 2400 visitors per month. As far as the visitor logs go, the trend is towards more visitors as the rankings climb for more keywords. I was really short sighted in using "snews" as the cms. Not that, Snews is bad or anything in fact, snews is highly customizable and the template development is really good. But, lately I am feeling that wordpress will be a better choice since I want to put product data feeds, product galleries etc. and promote some affiliate programs. Do you guys think changing over from SNEWS to Wordpress will affect the rankings. I intend to keep the URL's similar. If someone has hands on experience in this matter, I would love to hear. I expect a slight loss of rankings for a few days, may be am wrong.
Google - and any other search engine - won't recognise that urls are 'similar'. They are either exactly the same - or they will be treated as totally new. Or - you put in pace a 301 server side redirect from the old page to the new page.
There is no reason you should if you are quick and get your permalinks set right and install all the SEO addons that willl help. WordPress ranks well for me with no problems. As long as there is minimal downtime and you only use the 301 redirect if you have to anywhere you should be fine.
doesn't hurt to change like the rest mention just use 301 redirects on your old pages with deep links.
I am creating the new wordpress based site on a subdomain. Once it is complete to my satisfaction I will move it onto the main domain. I have blocked spiders from the subdomain while I work. Also present url's are like "oneword-anotherword". So I think I can safely create the pages in wordpress with same URL structure. @SEOIbiza, so I am not alone . I am changing to wordpress since snews was hampering the extensibility of the site also I feel wordpress is more SEO friendly with the tags and all.
you have to do what you have to do. if you need to change the site to wordpress, then go ahead and do it. i like the idea of doing the site on subdomain and blicking the spiders. even if you switch to wordpress, your main site or blog URL will still be the same. for inner pages, you can do a 301 redirect that will get the spiders forwarded to the new blog.
nope, you're not alone, and it's going fine, we couldn't help targeting a load of new stuff too, and it seems we're holding current rankings and rocketing up for the new stuff as the 301s kick in. how you getting on?