Redirect questions

[lojdqvist]

Hi!

A client of mine have created a new site with a new URL structure which they launched the other day. They have done a 301 redirect on all pages on the old site to the start page on the new site. E.g:
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com
www.olddomain.com/subfolder2/index.html -> www.newdomain.com

I'm thinking of fixing this now so the redirect instead looks someting like this:
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.html
www.olddomain.com/subfolder1/index.html -> www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.html

Two questions:

1. Is it worth doing the latter kind of redirect in all cases (after all, it involves quite a lot more work compared to the first solution)? or do you recommend the first solution for all redirect projects?
2. Now that they have already done the first solution, is it at all worth amending this to the latter or is everything spoiled now that they have already gone ahead with the first solution?

Many thanks in advance!

[rasmusbang]

I would recommend making the redirects from subfolder to subfolder. If you redirect all pages to the new frontpage Google needs to crawl the new site from scratch in order to index all pages.

If you make the 301 redirect from old pages to corresponding new pages I would say it is worth the effort. Otherwise www.newdomain.com/newsubfolder1/index.html needs to build up its own new page ranking since it is a new URL that Google does not know.

Question is if Google has already crawled a lot of the old URLs, but if it was me I would get on making the correct redirects before Google crawls to many of the old URLs. This will give the new site better ranking from the start I should think AND it will save time for the Google crawlers. One should always anticipate a drop when changing domain, but it is always a good idea to take precautions in order to ensure a quick bounce back.

[kameeleon]

in cpanel there is an option to redirect all at once, keeping the structure of site. try cpanel.yourdomain.com

[JaspalX]

Agree with Rasmus pm the whole.

I'd still go with the updated subfolder version even if google has crawled the pages...these things take a while to settle down.

If there are lots of pages, check out the tool Russ Jones shared for using Levenshtein distance to automate creating redirects http://www.seomoz.org/blog/set-it-and-forget-it-seo-chasing-the-elusive-passive-seo-dream

There's another great post for larger sites that could help: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/scripting-seo-5-pandafighting-tricks-for-large-sites-14455

And here's another version that creates the htaccess redirects for you (though I've not tried it so don't know how well it works) http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2010/10/levinshtein_link_fixer_aka_the.htm

[DougRoberts]

From a visitors perspective, if you've got links to deep pages, then it would be worth creating redirects to the relevant content on the new site.

If someone follows a link from another site with anchor text along the lines of "see this great article about x" and it just goes to the homepage, the visitor is going to find it rather jarring...

[AlanMosley]

You should only need one redirect if link stucture is the same,

point both domains at the new site

then create a rule if HTTP_HOST is not newdomain.com then redirect to new domain,

here is the rule for IIS

<rule name="CanonicalHostNameRule1"><match url="(.*)"><conditions><add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^thatsit.com.au$" negate="true"></add></conditions>
            <action type="Redirect" url="http://thatsit.com.au/{R:1}"></action></match></rule>

http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues

[lojdqvist]

Thanks guys!

So my interpretation of your feedback and the short answer to my questions are:

1. Yes, it's worth doing.
2. Yes, it's worth doing.

Cheers!