Thread

I have an old static site that ranks high on search engines for all the right reasons - good content, urls, etc.

I am switching the site over to EE, and am expecting an SEO hit because all the URLs would change.

Is there some way to minimize this? Redirects or something? When I google this topic the only information I get is on how to redirect static page urls to dynamic ones that would have been “crufty” using mod_rewrite to take advantage of the static URLs. However - EE already has a good clean URL naming structure, and I just want to tell Google where all the old content went.

Any ideas or resources on this subject?

My thoughts:

- Use 301 (Permanent) Redirects to let the search engines know where to locate the new content and to update their indexes accordingly.

RewriteRule ^old_segment new_segment [L,R=301]

A google search on 301 redirects will get you a ton of resources on doing that.

- Take great care in ensuring you have the same exact title tags on the same pages when you launch the new site. This can be done easily through custom fields, global variables and conditionals.

Thanks, why do you suggest exact titles - Won’t the search robots automatically update after a 301 redirect? Would it hurt to have new titles?

I only mentioned that because I thought you wanted to try and not at all affect your current search engine ranking. That’s it. 😊

Craig,

If you have a large number of pages, you want to be careful in doing your 301s. If you do too many at once, Google might get suspicious. Instead of redirecting all pages, Tedster (one of the mods at WebmasterWorld) suggests that it is much better to only redirect your highest traffic pages. Take a look at his post in this thread.