Hello everyone. A few years ago I worked for a now large search engine marketing company. Unfortunately, a lot has changed since then. I am the new Director of IT for a small retail business. Our current website software sucks and is very difficult to create a new theme for. Our website badly needs an upgrade and I want something easy to integrate and modify as well as add custom modules to when the need arises. I have picked out a piece of software that I believe will work well. Now, on to my question... We are currently getting about 75% of our traffic from organic search results. We also have a high bounce rate of about 45% and an average time on site of about 3 and a half minutes. Question: If I change the website URL structure, about how long we will be dropped about of the organic results? Last I knew, Google would put you into the sandbox for three months. After three months, they would begin crawling the website again and three months later, you would begin ranking again. This is about six months from what I remember and unfortunately, we cannot wait that long. If someone could please give me an honest answer from experience, I would greatly appreciate it. In this economy we have lost a lot of money from what I have been told and seen and I am working to better the business by upgrading server hardware and website software. Thank you very much in advance!
Do you know how incredibly difficult it would be to use 301 redirects? There is over 1000 items in just one of our stores. That would take hours if not days to write redirects for all of them.
You obviously did not read what I already quoted from another member that replied. Using 301 redirects might be the way to go, but unfortunately when the systems are so different in URL structures, it will not be an easy task. The PHP spider that I have written will have to pull every single URL from our current website (or just the ones that Google has indexed) and then I will have to write the redirects by hand matching them with the new URL. Again, something that is NOT easy!
There isn't really an obligation to read all comments before you make a comment for the topic.. Anyhow, I can understand that it might be hard, But it's worth it. I've had much bigger issues than 1.000 pages with URL Structure/Meta & Content over each page..