I own this anime website. At the moment it is a mess (not earning anything on adsense anymore too). I wish to revamp the site, possibly make drupal the backend or maybe restart completely. This site is several years old and holds a lot of index high ranking SE pages. If I revamp how can I maintain the status of my site, not loose any SE traffic etc?
The issue with a complete revamp on a new platform, is that the urls change. Anytime you change a url, you need to redirect it permanently (301 redirect) to a corresponding page with a new url.
You can solve your problem by using 301 redirect script at server end, which will redirect your old URL to new one.
You need to map each old pages with newly create page and use 301 redirection method to gain PR, traffic for individual page of your site. The most important thing is mapped your old url with new one and use 301 method. by doing that you give a hint to spider to crawl new page, it takes time to understand for crawler and once your new page is indexed SE's will remove the old web page copy from their database. Thanks!
Everyone is correct on the 301 redirect. I would also attempt to roll out the project in small pieces attempt to retain search engine position. good luck
if you do a redirect make sure the 404 page is in place properly. also you may wanna do some 301 redirects wherever you can.
just make sure you maintain the url format after revamp. If you change the url structure, just place some 301 redirects for old urls.