Okay, the thread topic might indicate development aspect in general but actually I am going to revamp a website completely in such a way that there will be pretty urls, nice structure and design etc etc. The guys coming from search engine will land on the old index page while the can view the new site by clicking (check our new look) myolddomain.com/index.html (old site) myolddomain.com/new/index.html (newsite) Now the question is, I want google to start indexing the new pages I develop (definitely google will index them) but what would happen when I'll shift my new site from the "new" directory to the root? To make my question a lot easier for you to understand, whats the best way to revamp a website without loosing very little, if not complete rankings in search engines I know how to appreciate good replies
This is a terrible approach... Don't go about it this way. I could see why you might want the old an new copy of the site availalbe to users for some time so you can get feedback to see how they like the new design, but making the new site available to the search engines at URLs where it's not going to permanently live is a BAD idea. Don't let the engines index the new pages until they are at their permanent URLs (under / instead of under /new). If you want users to be able to see and comment on the new site before it goes live so that you can make last minute tweaks to the design then fine. But do NOT let the engines crawl those URLs under /new. Try this instead (this assumes you're on an Apache web server)... 1) Place a rule in your robots.txt like: This will prevent the engines from crawling and indexing the new site. 2) Make the new site available under /new during your "beta" period when users can view the new design AND the old site. During this period you can make any changes you want to the /new pages - URL name changes for the pages/folder, content changes, changes to interlinking of new pages, etc. - without worrying about the engines because those pages will not be crawled/indexed. 3) Prepare and TEST 301 redirects for ALL "old" URLs to the new design's SEO friendly URLs using Mod Rewrite / .htaccess. 4) When your "beta" period is over and you're ready for the new site to go live, I would suggest putting up a splash page that returns a 503 Service Unavailable HTTP status code during the time when you are making the new design live (i.e. while you're implementing the remaining steps below). This will tell the search engines your site is down temporarily and to come back later. 5) Remove "/new" from the URLs (through your CMS if you have one or copy the entire site from /new to /). Prior to moving the /new site up a level you can also delete all of the old pages if they are not going to be used by the new site. They are not required if you have implemented your 301 redirects w/ Mod Rewrite correctly. 6) Install all of your .htaccess files to implement the 301 redirects from the old urls to the new SEO friendly URLs. 7) Add an additional rule in your root .htaccess similar to the following: This is just in case other sites link to your /new URLs while the site is in "beta" mode. You can't prevent them from linking to those URLs but you CAN regain credit for those links rather than letting them 404. 8) Once you've moved the new site to where it will live permanently and installed all of the .htaccess files to implement your 301 redirects, remove your splash page. 9) Remove the Disallow: /new rule from the robots.txt file. If you are changing every URL on your site, it CAN be done successfully w/out negative long term affects to your rankings and traffic, but you need to plan, plan, plan, test, test, test... Here is a post I made in the past that you may find useful. I detailed lots of things you should consider when redesigning a site.
There's a google webmaster tool that you can notify them that you have moved your website into new address. I'm not sure if this case is applicable. You might as well give it a try. Google will ask you to verify your new site.
I'd just like to say, "read Canonical's post carefully". It's not often someone gives such detailed and useful advice here.
You do realize that you've not only saved me a bunch of typing, but now I'll have no choice but to beat people senseless with that link, right?
thanx alot guys for posting.. canonical, u are the man ! anybody wanna compete canonical in good posting?
Plus keep google in the loop with constant sitemap updates. Heck if you move a page from http://www.yoursite.com/filename.html to http://www.yoursite.com/folder/filename.html or vice versa, google will maintain the ranking, don't try it with subdomains though. they won't keep the ranking in that scenario...
PS: On step #7 about I had a brainfart... I believe the correct .htaccess commands are: I had '*.' when it should have read '.*' to match any character zero or more times.