Moving to new Website

kitkat9933 · 16 Jul 2014 at 11:50

I'm about to finish a totally redesigned site I've made for my employer over the last few months and soon it is coming to the point where it will need to go live.

I've worked with publicly accessible sites before, but I've never had to revamp an existing site where I've had to deal with the deployment as well. The site has been thoroughly tested internally and will soon be uploaded to the live server. I will first serve it under a subdomain with the word 'beta' as a prefix, where it will be tested for a week or two more, after that, the old site will be moved to the subdomain 'archive' and the beta site will be then served under the main domain name.

As said the domain name won't change but the URL management is totally different such as <domain>/vacancies will be <domain>/index.php/vacancies

What must I do in order to protect things such as search engine results and rankings, which are of crucial importance to the business. I'm assuming things like ensuring correct data and metadata in headers. Could someone provide me with a good list of things I need/should do?

Thanks,

James

m4rkw7 · 19 Jul 2014 at 00:14

Why would it change from something like domain.com/pagename, index.php is a page so cannot have a /something else after it?

Anyway I'd just 301 redirect the old stuff.

JimAroo · 19 Jul 2014 at 00:58

Why not just rewrite the index.php leaving only what you want in this case 'vacancies'.

Any URLs that have changed do what m4rkw7 suggested and 301 redirect the old stuff.

Make sure you submit the new sitemap to Google Webmaster tools.

m4rkw7 · 19 Jul 2014 at 13:58

Oh I think I get it now after re-reading.

It'll be <domain>/vacancies/index.php not <domain>/index.php/vacancies?

Yeah just 301 it.

kitkat9933 · 19 Jul 2014 at 21:03

m4rkw7 said:
Oh I think I get it now after re-reading.

It'll be <domain>/vacancies/index.php not <domain>/index.php/vacancies?

Yeah just 301 it.

The current site is a Drupal based site that has URL rewrites. I've rewrote it by hand, so if I just 301 and submit to webmaster tools I will be ok?

Redrum · 20 Jul 2014 at 00:20

kitkat9933 said:
so if I just 301 and submit to webmaster tools I will be ok?

Officially according to Google guidelines yes, but in my experience, no. I think your listings will take a massive dive initially, although they may recover after a few months.

It should be possible to keep the same URLs by using Apache rewrites or whatever the equivalent is if you're not using Apache.

Also, it sounds like if you don't use something like mod rewrite, all your pages are going to start /index.php, and that's not great for SEO, including on new pages you add.

kitkat9933 · 20 Jul 2014 at 19:05

Redrum said:
Officially according to Google guidelines yes, but in my experience, no. I think your listings will take a massive dive initially, although they may recover after a few months.

It should be possible to keep the same URLs by using Apache rewrites or whatever the equivalent is if you're not using Apache.

Also, it sounds like if you don't use something like mod rewrite, all your pages are going to start /index.php, and that's not great for SEO, including on new pages you add.

So if I remove the index.php section on all the URLs and map all the URLs to as they were before, for the key ones anyway. Some will be impossible to map as the previous Drupal site didn't have URL rewrites for everything and some were just node numbers.

Redrum · 21 Jul 2014 at 00:52

kitkat9933 said:
Some will be impossible to map as the previous Drupal site didn't have URL rewrites for everything and some were just node numbers.

Nothing should be impossible. Even if there is no pattern that links the old to the new URLs, you can do each one individually assuming there aren't millions of them. If your old URLs are so meaningless though, you might be better off moving away from them anyway, but I'd advise not doing so all at once.

Where I work, we deal with moving sites from other platforms to our own and what we do is for every page that has an equivilent on the new site, we keep the old URL in place during the move using rewrites. But we want the sites to switch to the SEO friendly URLs of our platform, so a week or two after the move, we instruct our platform to gradually start switching pages to the new URLs. Once a day, it will pick a certain number of pages and switch them to the new URLs and enables 301 redirects for the old URLs.

We've found this to be the best way to preserve Google listings. You need small gradual changes when possible. But this might be a lot of work for you so you'll have to decide if it's worth it for you.

kitkat9933 · 21 Jul 2014 at 10:10

Only certain key-pages (and not all of them) have SEO friendly URL's such as vacancies and contact us, which I'l try and keep the URL's the same. However, there are 100's of pages without SEO friendly URL's and I don't have the time to really manage such a switchover.

As it's for a school, apart from key pages such as Key-Dates, Vacancies and Contact us, from our traffic reports most people either search for the school/go to the site directly then look for the page they want, rather than googling for specifics. If you search for the school, it isn't like there are alternatives, so I'm hoping if I protect key pages, it should be ok.