Changing from Squarespace to Wordpress - Will I Lose My Rankings?

[JoshTurner]

I have a friend who has a squarespace site that is giving him lots of trouble.  For one, even though it is supposed to redirect to GreenSpaceConstruct.com...Bing and Yahoo don't seem to recognize this domain.  Instead, they show greenlightconstruct.squarespace.com in the serp's.  Oddly, Google shows the site as GreenSpaceConstruct.com.

The site is ranking well for some terms.  I'm afraid that converting to wordpress will hurt his rankings in the short term.  If bing and yahoo are crawling this squarespace domain, and he moves it...is there a way not to just completely lose the rankings?

Thanks for any thoughts.  Much appreciated!

Josh

[RyanKent]

Changing from Squarespace to Wordpress - Will I Lose My Rankings?

Your website architecture has an impact on your rankings. Whenever you change your code, your rankings may change. It depends on many factors. A few examples:

• how is each site coded? Does one site use HTML code with is better coded then the other which leads to the site being more crawlable by search engines?

• will URLs be changing during the move? If so, there is at least a minor loss of link juice. This loss can be made up through various site improvements such as cleaner URLs.

• does the new site resolve various issues which were hurting your SEO performance in the past?

• does the new site offer new features which improve SEO?

• do you have a quality WordPress developer? I am not asking if the developer may have built a WP site before, but rather does your developer regularly build WP sites? There is a big difference between a pure WP developer who loves building WP sites and that's all he/she does, to a developer who makes a WP site one month, then a Joomla site the next, then a Drupal site the month after.

Your question is kind of like asking "I am selling my Chevy and buying a Ford. Will my new Ford be a better car?". There are a lot of follow up questions which need to be asked and answered.

[JoshTurner]

Thanks so much for the response Ryan.  Lots of good advice.  His problem/opportunity isn't just changing architecture, unfortunately.  If his site were already "hosted" at the main domain, then I wouldn't be afraid of him dropping from the rankings.  But it seems that the search engines are recognizing the site.squarespace.com domain instead of the site.com domain that it is supposed to redirect to.

My sense is that the right thing for him to do long-term is to fix it, and make the necessary improvements to regain the position.  It can't be good for potential customers to see the site.squarespace.com result in the serp's instead of his actual domain.

[RyanKent]

Without knowing more details, we are left to blindly guess at why Bing/Yahoo are not referencing the main site. If all is well with Google, I would start by logging into Bing Webmaster Tools.