If I upgrade a website from standard hand coded html files content to a CMS such as joomla, and have the same content pages rewrite the URLs to the old html URLs will the existing page ranks and weight those pages had transfer over? If those old urls are redirected to the new more categorized url's will the old page ranks transfer or will all the pages start out as zeros? Also, will urls with folders containing keywords improve rankings for those keywords or no affect at all? In example: /red-toys/smooth-red-toys.html /smooth-red-toys.html That is my overall dilemma. We have old, root placed html files with relevant keyword titles, but we are upgrading to a CMS based system that is already content categorized. We have existing page ranking on the old URLs and I would like to know if that goes away when redirecting to new URLs. And if folders containing keywords will have any positive effect on rankings? Thanks
If you do 301 redirects from the example you give, than you have a chance of rankings to drop for a few months, at most. A possible alternative is to leave the old .html pages up do nothing with them and install the CMS for all new content developed. That would eliminate any downtime from the search engines from redirecting to new URL strings. I can see the need to have everyting uniformed, but if you're business model is, say, selling advertising space, then having downtime in impressions is a definite bad idea. If its ok to have a little downtime in rankings as a precaution, then go ahead and make the change and do the 301's.
Do you really want to change the structure of your URLs ? If the old URL's are doing just fine, maybe you should not even touch the URL structure and keep it intact as it is. Altho, the ranking will effect if if you make a redirection, but than, it depends how important is that for you. Ex. if your current URL's are not bringing you enough organic traffic, and you are pretty sure that the new URL's will perform better in SERPs i would risk a couple months, but will stay safe for the rest of the time when the old URL's will be replaced with the new ones on the SERPs. This is all something only you can give value to, if its worth to play this way or no.
The business is a service based company that creates industrial equipment. There are basically 2-3 pages that have a page rank while the other 15-20 are just for more information. The site pagerank is 5, and the top page rank page is 4, second being 3. I'd say most of our traffic comes from a mix of ppc and generic searches. The business is pretty busy right now so I'll risk the drop of rankings when redoing the URLs. I'll keep the top 2-3 pages in the root but redirect every other non-performing page to the new CMS. Thanks for the help.
I recently redesigned a companies website as well as created new URL strings. I 301'd the old URL strings to the new optimized ones and in about 20 days, the traffic increased by 20%. In 60 days, the traffic was up 90%. Make sure everything is done correctly, efficiently and in a timely manner and you should experience an excellent boost in rankings and efficiency.