I have a website that is 3 years old, it is an ecommerce store. The website is out dated, but gets alot of traffic. so i have hired a company to build a brand new website. My concern is what will happen to my listings in google when i take down my old website, and put up my new website? will my links go away? will they come back? what is the normal procedure when someone takes down a website, and puts up a brand new one? thanks
You could very well have a serious mess on your hands now if you don't keep the addresses the same! If the company did not bring this up then, well.... speaks volumes. Even if they are simply designers. Nigel
Implementing a site redesign can drastically affect your rankings in a positive or negative way depending on what about the site is changing and how you implement the changes. You had better do a LOT of planning if you are doing anything other than making CSS changes to existing pages to change colors and fonts. If you are changing URLs you have a LOT more work to do. If you're changing the content of the pages then you have lots of work to do. Last December I implemented a site redesign on our PR7 site w/ over 4000 URLs. EVERY URL on the site changed from .asp to extensionless page names so I had to implement 4000+ 301 redirects. I rank #1 for some of the hardest single word head terms in our vertical which is probably one of the 3 most competitive verticals on the web. Some of the head terms return over 300,000,000 results... many over 150,000,000+. We spend several million dollars per month for this one site on Adwords alone in a good month to give you an idea of the competitiveness of our vertical. So we had a LOT to lose if we screwed up organic rankings. I recently posted some lessons learned on my blog about web site redesigns and SEO. It's lengthy but covers a LOT of things that you should consider if you're making drastic changes to your site. The key to a successful site redesign is, as with any change, in the planning, testing, and execution details. Hopefully some of it will help you with your redesign.
Nice post. I try to leave the canonical stuff to Canonical when I see him floating around lol... Nigel
the entire site is changing, the actual domain name is staying the same, but the current cart is x-cart, and its going to be changed to magento. so all the product urls will change. should i cancel the project?
i currently have 15000, but once i get the site done, ill be adding atleast 50 to 100k im so worried because this is my livelyhood, and i cannot afford to loose my business. i just know that it needs so much attention. it would be easiert to build a whole new site. im extremely scared...see my old site is totally not search engine optimized, they said they would add a site map, and some other basis seo. they seem like a good company...they are not cheap. it is costing me 5 k.
"see my old site is totally not search engine optimized, they said they would add a site map, and some other basis seo. they seem like a good company...they are not cheap. it is costing me 5 k." They would appear to have no earthly idea what they are talking about when it comes to seo. Adding a site map either xml or human readable has little if anything to do with SEO. You have a whopper of a problem on your hands here. You should drop us a link so we can advise you how to fix it. SEO comes in many shapes and sizes. I have to fiddle with some zencart stuff from time to time. The addresses are a mess but it does not seem to matter. What is not search engine friendly about it now? That stuff should have product specific meta info etc. What they should have done is simply redesigned your x-cart deployment and called it a day. Nigel, don't sweat it, we will get you sorted out. You may want to tell them to hold their horses in the meantime though.
yes, however, that is likely a real whopper of a task. I will let canonical field that one. I don't mess with .htaccess too much, certainly not at that scope. I will look the site over in a sec. The other issue that occurred to me is you need a ripping fast dedicated server that is fine tuned to run Magento with that many products or the site will be slow to the point of unusable. Nigel
Just make sure you have clean redirects on your old pages and you'll be ok. Screw canonicalization on something like this, it's irrelevant to your situation. Use 301 redirects on all of the indexed pages, and you'll have NO issues. It takes a while, but it's worth it. I actually helped a client with this recently, and there was no ranking impacts whatsoever.