Replacing site: search engine result affected?

Bananna man

Hey,

I am totally re-designing a site that has a good google ranking. Alot of the text and meta tags from the original site will be re-used but all html will be different. Am i right in assuming this wont affect their search results in a negative way? I just want to be sure before i make the change.

Thanks

mneylon

Will the filenames change ie. if you had about.html in the old version, for example, will it still exist in the new one?

Bananna man

blacknight wrote:

Will the filenames change ie. if you had about.html in the old version, for example, will it still exist in the new one?

I havent made sure they have the same file names, i can do though. Will this be a problem?

Bananna man

I've just checked. I have the files neatly laid out in folders and sub folders whereas the old version just had the all bundled together in the main rootfolder. Should i set it up exactly like the old version?

mneylon

Bananna man wrote:

Should i set it up exactly like the old version?

Yes and no.

If you have good backlinks and PR on your current sites subpages it would be a shame to lose them completely

If you can tell the robots that you've updated the site structure it can help, so you may want to look into mod_rewrite

Bananna man

Cheers, ill have to look into it. Also, the new sites file extension is now *.php as opposed to the old *.shtml, will this be a problem?

They have a PR rating of 4 and dont want to be responsible for that nose diving :eek:

colm_c

You can get some mod_rewrite to rewrite all .shtml files to .php

Some standard 301 redirects in your .htaccess file should also help, from old file to new...

Maybe a 404 page with a database of page mapping which checks the old url and forward the user on to the new page might work? Don't forget to send the 301 code with the header.

Easier than maintaining a large .htaccess file

Bananna man

colm_c wrote:

You can get some mod_rewrite to rewrite all .shtml files to .php

Some standard 301 redirects in your .htaccess file should also help, from old file to new...

Maybe a 404 page with a database of page mapping which checks the old url and forward the user on to the new page might work? Don't forget to send the 301 code with the header.

Easier than maintaining a large .htaccess file

Doh, all the above i know nothing about. From the little i do know will a redirect not be bad for SEO. Its on a windows server as well, is .htaccess a Linux thing? Ant there was me thinking this would be simple

CuLT

Redirects are only bad if the page is a run-of-the-mill redirect page.

colm_c is talking about having your webserver internally redirect. It's pretty neat stuff, though it will require a bit of effort to get your head around.

This is worth checking out.

it is .htaccess based though.

Bananna man

Just been on to Host Ireland. I was talking to someone in their that knows a good bit about SEO (i was talking to him on this topic a couple of years ago). According to him i should be ok with my new subfolder filing system as long as the content is still similar to before. He said that google will realise that the files have just been moved (even though they will now have a new file extension) and actually preferes files sorted into sub folders.

The only problem i might have is that until the new site is indexed, the older page version will still be appearing on google search results as i am not just copying over them.

Does this all sound like sound advice? I myself think google bots will be more likely to figure this out than doing redirects which i know they dont like.

Another thing of interest he told me is that the amount of sub folders you have has no real bearing, what really matters is the number of clicks it takes to get to the individual files from your home page. For every extra click you are looking at about a 30% decrease in how google rates its relevance.