301 redirects from old to new pages whit a lot of changes

[tomas.guemes]

Hello all,

We are going to restyle and change CMS so all the urls will change. We are also updating content, adding much more content to the old pages trying to be more user and SEO friendly.

My doubt is about doing 301 redirects from old to new pages when the content has changed a lot. Does it will mantain the ranking of the page or will crawlers thought that is a total diferent page.

For example: one page new page will change from the old one the url, title, headers, meta description, content text and images.

Should i maintain old content and do the CMS change with the 301 redirects and later change the content, that means a lot of work, or do it all at once?

Thanks in advance

Tomas

[timhatton]

The best way to think about this is - what happens if you don't do the 301 redirect from the old pages?

• Any links to those pages will be worthless (as the spiders will end up at a 404 error page, so the search engine will eventually drop the page from the search results)
• Any traffic which comes into those pages will get the same 404 page - so any referral traffic which follows those links in will be lost
• You're forcing the spiders to start from scratch again with your site - to spider and index all the content from the home page

What approach you take depends on your timescales, and how quickly you're going to create the new content.  I'm also assuming that maintaining the existing URLs either isn't feasible or there's more value in creating new URLs (e.g. old ones were www.domain.com/index.php?id=3483844 and ones are www.domain.com/category/title-title-title.)

I would be tempted to try and do both at once - just doing the redirect will get people going to the correct URL, but the content will still be regarded as "old" by the search engines.  Substantially changed content going onto new URLs will get the benefit of the 301 from the old URL (for referral links etc.), plus a "look again" from the spiders as it will be considered 'fresh'.

There is a very good recent discussion from a couple of weeks ago about new vs. old content http://www.seomoz.org/blog/new-links-old-pages-whiteboard-friday and one from November at http://justinbriggs.org/methods-for-evaluating-freshness