We are working on changing the directory structure for a clients site to make a better directory structure. The current pages of the website are already indexed on Google and some of them are showing in rankings for some niche keywords. However, after the new directory structure is implemented, we plan to get links for the new URLs and also get them indexed on Google quickly after the change. What will be the best way to do all this smoothly and also gain the rankings on the Search Engines after the URL changes? The content and every thing will remain the same, only the links and URLs will change. Later we will update Title Tags, Meta Tags and also the content of the website itself. We are already using XML sitemap for Google and submitted it, so that will again be submitted after the URL changes. Please give more suggestions for this. Thanks
I'm facing the same problem right now... what I'm going to do, is leave the old directory up for a while, but change all the pages to "page has moved" and have a link to the new page... I had a script to do it for me a while ago, not sure if i still have it...
The best way is to use mod_rewrite and remap all the old URLs to point to the new URLs so this way your users never see an error 404
Having done this many time now, I would recommend that you add the "new site" pages to the "old site" at the beginning. Doing a hard cutover, will lose all PR and indexing for ~ 4 months. Although you will implement many 301 redirects, you will miss many and that is what will kill you. Although you can fix the intenal link structure in time, it is the outside environment that causes the greatest harm. The outside websites have linked to the old site. By changing to the new site, you break all thoughs links. Of the old pages that have PR now, I would do everything to keep them by editing (re-designing) the content of the page. Therefore as you work thru the updates, the old pages (no pr) are just "broken linkED". I have tried the mapping of the new site to old site pages concept but you lose PR. Google will give you about 3 months to remove "duplicate content" but by then both the new and old site pages will be indexed. At this time you can start to delete the old pages from the site. Oh, warning. If you do a hard cut over and at the same time trigger 301 redirects there is a great possibility to bring down the site for 2 days and not be able to fix it. Reason: If the cut over fails for any unknown reasons and you have to do a "fall back" to the old site, the 301 redirects will then create "holes" in the navigation. Site dead - you're dead But if you are going to do a hard cutover, then it is better to have both sites operational under two seperated domains and get them working and "accepted". Then flip IP addresses or domain names. Good luck...
I wish I knew this or though of it two weeks ago. I just completely redid six of my websites that had thousands of pages indexed. Changed them all from standard html where to make a change on one page I had to change all the pages manually to Drupal. Now I have to sit and wait for bots to start to indexing my pages.
You have to be careful with those redirects not to get something mapped recursively. I've seen it happen more than once that mod_rewrite brought down a a fairly hefty server by having poorly mapped redirects. This could cause you significant down time.
As some have already said, the best way is to use 301 redirects for the old urls to redirect to the new urls. I've done that many of times.
Why not get some backlinks to your sitemap from high PR sites? Do so using social bookmarking and article submission to EzineArticles. It works wonders and indexing will be fast when the spiders come knocking.
@catanich, actually the sites are very new and none of the internal pages have any PR, that is the main reason why we are implementing this change at this stage rather than delaying it further. So PR being lost is not an issue. I'll keep the other issues into consideration. Thank you. Thanks, thats a good idea. Will do that for sure.