301 redirect or maual edit of new urls

[Gregos]

Hello forum!

I will get right to the point,I have a 4 year old PR4 site with lots of links (vacation rentals marketplace, like  Homeaway),

In about a month from now new CMS will be ready and I will be doing redesign of the site.

The problem that I have is (as many of you can guess) losing all the old links that rank high = losing traffic / revenue.

Two posiblle solutions here:

1. 301 redirect for each page that ranks high - point it to new url

2. Manually editing new urls created by new CMS and making them to be the same as old ones. This means that some number of urls (the ones that rank high and generate traffic) would be exactly the same while other ones would be generated by CMS thus dufferent in many ways (unicode,different keywords etc.)

What would You do here?

I am more for 301 redirect but I read all kinds of horror stories in drop of SERP.

Thank You for help and advices in advance.

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Dusan,

I have worked on a number of projects such as this and I am actually working on a CMS migration at the moment. For this specific client we have decided to keep all of the URLs the same because they were all relevant and were ranking well in the search results.

The decision that you have to make here could be based heavily on the current state of the existing site. If your current URLs have been created very ineffectively, i.e. they are all dynamic URLs and have no keyword relevance to the page content then there may be a case for going down the 301 redirect option. What I would say is that if you go down the route of 301 redirects you WILL see drops in the SERPs.

By creating a 301 redirect to a new URL on the site you are essentially halving the PageRank going to the page from what was going to the old URL. This new URL will also need to be indexed by the search engines and if it isn't done fairly quickly then you are going to see some traffic drops.

If you let me know the URL of your existing site then I will take a quick look at it and let you know the potential risks, etc.

Matt.

[Gregos]

Hello Matthew,

Thank You for your answer.

My old urls are not dynamic,they are well optimized with keywords and phrazes.
If You for example search "Apartmani Sutomore" my site is ranking no.1.

That specific one  and lots of other urls are generating a lot of traffic and its a big risk for me to lose them with upcoming season.

Not sure what to do here to tell You the truth.

All the best

Dusan

[MatthewBarby]

I see.

In my opinion, and from my previous experience, I would say to keep the exact same URLs as the old site. If there is no specific need for new URLs (which it doesn't seem is the case) then don't change them.

Keep the same structure as the current site along with the URLs and you will see the best results. Creating new URLs then redirecting to them is only going to cause problems.

Hope this helps.

Matt.

[Gregos]

Thank You for your advice.

There is no need for change but the change is not avoidable,with new CMS we will have 22 languages + unicode characters in urls + different url structure.

If I choose to keep some of the old urls (edit new ones maually so they are the same as old ones) and for the rest of the site I let the CMS create new ones, what do You think would I have a problem with Google?

The url difference is what I am concerned about,do search engines follow some url logic when indexing a site?

To explain it better:

I have city listing url

• the old one that is ranking high has following url: domain.com/keyword/city-name

-the new ones are having : domain.com/country/city-name/keyword

If I decide to keep the old one for serbian language for example and let the CMS create new urls for other languages,would that be ok in terms of SEO?