Comparing the site structure/design of my live site to my new design

[mjk26]

Hi SEOmoz team,

for the last few months I've been working on a new design for my website, the old, live design can be viewed at http://www.concerthotels.com - it is primarily focused on helping users find hotels close to concert venues throughout North America.  The old structure was built in such a way that each concert venue had a number of different pages associated with it (all connected via tabs) - a page with information about the venue, a page with nearby hotels to the venue, a page of upcoming events, a page of venue reviews.  An example of these pages can be seen at:

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue/madison-square-garden/304484

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-events/madison-square-garden-events/304484

http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-reviews/madison-square-garden-reviews/304484

The /venue-hotels/ pages are the most important pages on my website - and there is one of these pages for each concert venue - they are the landing pages for about 90% of the traffic on the website.

I decided that having four pages for each venue was probably a poor design, since many of the pages ended up having little or no useful, unique content.

So my new design attempts to bring a lot of the venue information together into fewer pages.  My new website redesign is temporarily situated at: (not currently launched to the public)

http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend

The equivalent pages for Madison Square Garden are now:

http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue/madison-square-garden/304484

(the page above contains venue information, events and reviews)

and

http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484

I would really appreciate any feedback from you guys, based on what you think of the new site design compared to the old design from an SEO point of view.  Of course, any feedback on site speed, easy of use etc compared to the old design would also be greatly appreciated.

My main fear is that when I launch the new design (the new URLs will be identical to the old ones), Google will take a dislike to it - I currently receive a large percentage of my traffic through Google organic search, so I don't want to launch a design that might damage that traffic.  My gut instinct tells me that Google should prefer the new design - vastly reduced number of pages, each page now contains more  unique content, and it's very much designed for users, so I'm hoping bounce rate, conversion etc will improve too.  But my gut has been wrong in the past!

But I'd love to hear your thoughts, and thanks in advance for any feedback,

Cheers

Mike

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for sharing your site. There's always a fear that any redesign or structural changes will be ill-received by Google, but we never know until we try, right?

1. Overall, I like the design, look and feel. My only possible criticism here is the layout feels a little top-heavy. With the old design I felt I could jump in and start browsing hotels right away. The new design encourages me to search first, with the hotel results somewhat hidden beneath the fold. This may have a negative effect on conversions/bounce rate - but again you won't really know until you test it.

2. Generally, I'm a fan of consolidating low-value pages, or tabbed content into a single URL. I've worked with sites that have done this and seen a modest boost in traffic. That said, it's not always roses. If Google sees high quality ranking signals on those pages, and they suddenly disappear to be redirected via consolidation, weird things can and do sometimes happen. Regardless, I'd say overall I'd recommend you continue down this course and give it a try.

• 301 redirects are in place and seem to work.
• My one small complaint is that the old content disappears if you have JavaScript disabled. (with a CSS class display=none) Not a huge deal as Google is getting better at indexing javascript dependent content, but I'm a crusty old sod who'd rather see a solution that degrades gracefully with javascript disabled, such as is found on our Moz profile pages:http://www.seomoz.org/users/profile/155620

3. The only other thing I'm midly concered by is that your landing page lists 5-6 hotels, and then the hotel page starts of by listing the same 5-6 hotels - which creates a bit of a duplicate content issue. The two pages are now very similar in content. Not sure off the top of my head how to address this, but it's something worth thinking about.

4. For your paginated hotel listings, be sure that your using proper pagination indexing techniques, such as rel="next".

5. When you make the switch, I'd keep a sitemap up of your "old" urls so that Google will crawl and "see" the redirect.

That's it! Overall, looks like you're headed in the right direction. Pay attention when you launch, and keep these issues in mind.

Hope this helps! Best of luck.

[mjk26]

Hi Cyrus,

thanks for spending so much time looking through my site and comparing my new design with the old one - I really appreciate it.  The feedback you've provided is great - I'm really happy that you like the new look and feel, and the points you've raised have certainly got me thinking.

1. I do agree, it is a little top heavy, and on the venue page the hotels are hidden beneath the fold, so you might be right that I notice a drop in conversion.  I'll launch the site to a small number of visitors and collect some stats.  It might not be a major issue, since the vast majority of users to the website actually land on the hotel listings page (as opposed to the general venue information page) - but I guess we'll find out

2. Mmmm, good point - I guess the only page I'm removing that Google might have thought contained high quality ranking signals would be my old venue reviews pages - they contain a lot of unique, customer reviews of the concert venue.  So there is potential for weird things to happen - I'll monitor it closely.

I hadn't thought of how the website would look, or work, if Javascript/cookies were disabled, so thank you for highlighting this - I'll certainly look into this.

3. You definitely raise a worrying point here - I hadn't thought of it from a duplicate content view - I simply thought that it would be nice to show the user a sample of hotels from the general venue page, before prompting them to view the entire list.  I don't know how I can change this - I guess reducing the number of hotels might help?  That way, I'd be reducing the amount of duplicate content.

4. Good point, I'll read the article and put the changes in place.

5. Ah, I hadn't thought of that - I was just going to put a sitemap of the new URLs up - how long would I need to include the "old" URLs in the sitemap for?

Thanks again for all your advice!

Best wishes

Mike

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Re: Sitemap - standard length of time is 30 days, or until you notice search engines have de-indexed the old URLs.