My site is a mess - what do I do?

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by Jon12345, Jul 11, 2009.

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  1. #1
    I have a website about 6 years old were the pages seem to be all over the place, structurally. e.g. I have some pages in the root and some under mysite.com/mycomplexdirectory/pagename.php

    Some of the page templates are different so it looks like a different site! Links are broken.

    My question is:

    How do I go about rebuilding the structure? I mean I have pages ranked already so if I change the structure, I will lose the rank?

    Thanks,

    Jon
     
    Jon12345, Jul 11, 2009 IP
  2. Alevoor

    Alevoor Active Member

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    #2
    Yeah, you may stand to lose some PR, if this is what you meant. However the bigger loss would be that of backlinks of all those pages you are going to relocate.

    Here is what I would probably do
    1. Redirect to the new page URL from old for all those that are getting high traffic as long as contacting the linking websites to make corrections to your links is practical
    2. Use the 404 error page for the rest of pages
    3. Put up a sitemap prominantly in all these new pages/404 pages
    4. Submit your new sitemap.xml to search engines regularly as you progress with restructuring

    You need to develop a strategy based on your statistics and priorities but I think this probably will be useful to you.
     
    Alevoor, Jul 11, 2009 IP
  3. Jon12345

    Jon12345 Peon

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    #3
    Thank you for that. Just what I needed.
     
    Jon12345, Jul 13, 2009 IP
  4. Alevoor

    Alevoor Active Member

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    #4
    Not a problem Jon, almost everyone who started off 6 years ago has this mess on hand because of dependency on html or html generators. However a good CMS should take care of that for you.
    Good luck
     
    Alevoor, Jul 13, 2009 IP
  5. newostar

    newostar Peon

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    #5
    Changing the pages and sitemap is a great suggestion and know you won't loose pagerank so long as you leave all the pages you have as part of the same overall website. Moving their structure won't do anything to hurt them. In fact, with a more logical site structure you might get a better page rank.

    Good luck.
     
    newostar, Jul 13, 2009 IP
  6. Canonical

    Canonical Well-Known Member

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    #6
    o Design the ideal site
    o On a page-by-page basis, 301 redirect all old URLs to the new URL whose content most closely resembles the content found at the old URL
    o Call it a day

    You can check out a post I made a while back containing some things to consider when redesigning a site. It can be quite scary, but if you think it through, come up with a plan, and execute... your site can actually rank better than ever.
     
    Canonical, Jul 14, 2009 IP