This is such an obvious newbie question I have no doubt someone else has asked it before. It is also a difficult question/answer to search for because of the wide topic and specific question. Can anyone answer or point me to the answer to this, please... I am about to replace a poorly designed but pretty well-search-engine-ranked (for the relevant keywords), fairly static, website. The page/folder structure has changed completely. As soon as it goes live the links from Google will not work. 1. How quick does Google (and the others) pick up 4/10 (google) page-ranked (homepage) website structure changes these days? Presumably they crawl it pretty frequently. 2. Should I resubmit it to the searchengines? (I'm not if it has ever been submitted) 3. Any other advice? For example, should I create dummy pages for each of the old pages to redirect to the homepage or better still a relavent page? Thanks for any help.
I recommend you tu use htaccess rewrite, to make Google open the new pages from the old structure's links
definitely keep the "old" pages available to google with redirects or something to the new pages. Dont make it hard for google to index all your new pages.
Here are some answers to your questions: [QUOTE="combro]1. How quick does Google (and the others) pick up 4/10 (google) page-ranked (homepage) website structure changes these days? Presumably they crawl it pretty frequently.[/QUOTE] It depends on how frequently your site is crawled. If crawled on a daily basis, then your should get all your pages indexed and cached within a week. Probably will take longer though. Also depends on how you structured the URL folders. Are they easier to get to for the SE's? I'm assuming so. [QUOTE="combro]2. Should I resubmit it to the searchengines? (I'm not if it has ever been submitted)[/QUOTE] No. Just buy a couple of text links and you'll start to get crawled. You might want to create a sitemap and submit via Google Sitemaps, but purchasing a couple .edu links will do the trick. [QUOTE="combro]3. Any other advice? For example, should I create dummy pages for each of the old pages to redirect to the homepage or better still a relavent page?[/QUOTE] Well, probably most importatnly, you should have a redirect on your old pages to your new pages. That way, any traffic coming fron incoming links or search engine traffic won't wind up on a 404 error page. Also, establishing a redirect will ensure that the search engines will pick up the link going to interior pages on your site and will credit it to your new pages.