301 Redirects on Large Real Estate Website

[Nextman]

Hi guys,We are about to move over to a new website and need advice on handling the 301 redirects.We have a large real estate website with around 12,000 pages, a lot of these are properties (about 10,000)On our old website, the url structure for each property is as follows -domainname.com/property/view?property=14863on our new site, the url structure isdomainname.com/properties/view/6137The property ID number is always different from old site to new. The way we see it, we have two options. a.) a manual redirect of each and every property url. A very very long jobb.) a folder level redirect, so redirect the 'property' folder on the old site into the 'properties' folder on new. The con with this one is we are not sure if this is the best route to take, if it is how we would go about it?Some advice would be really appreciated guys. I know there are some hyper intelligent SEO's in here and we need to make sure we handle this right!Many thanks in advance.Mark

[loopyal]

If you have unix and shell access it should be a snap.

but as you're asking this question, you probably don't even know what "grep" is

Get a list of title and URLs from each site

mix them together

sort by title

this will tell you if there are duplicates or if you missed any

if the domain names are different search and replace them so they are the same

Manipulate the list so it is in redirect format

12,000 is not a lot. I worked on sites with several million.

Don't do a folder level redirect.

[Nextman]

Hey Alan,

Thanks loads for the advice there. Makes a lot of sense.

Problem I have is we do not have any kind of access to the old site. Nor the client having a good relationship with the agency who made the previous site.

I have run multiple crawls of the old site with Screaming Frog and Moz and I just cant get  all the properties spidered. Out of the total amount of properties I have about one third of them, which of course can be redirected.

We made a final change to the url structure so the property address is added. The urls now look like the following -

OLD - domainname.com/property/view?property=14863

NEW - domainname.com/property/street-name-postcode/propertyid

The main problem we have and why I think it is not possible using mod rewrite, is the property ids are different on both sites. There is really nothing in common between the two URLs at all aside from /property/ and page title.

Any further advice would be very much appreciated Alan as its clear you have done jobs like this before.

Thanks,

Mark

[MikeTek]

Hi Mark,

Considering that the old property IDs and new property IDs don't match up and you'd have to configure 1-to-1 redirects (with what sounds like a lot of manual work to get it right and potentially a very large .htaccess file), I'm going to ask a dumb question: why do you need to redirect all of the properties?

In cases like this, I invariably pull some data in to prioritize URLs. Namely, inbound link and direct/referral traffic data.

If a page is not linked to from any external subdomains and gets little or no direct or referral traffic, it's usually best to simply let it return a 404 once you've updated the site - Google will hit the 404 and de-index the page in due time, while the new page will (provided the new site has sound architecture and some authority to justify a deep crawl budget) get picked up.

The only justifiable reason to do a 1-to-1 301 redirect across the board for this many URLs, in my opinion, is if there is enough link equity / traffic to justify the work. Otherwise, Google knows how to handle 404s and they'll crawl/index the new property URLs in due time.

Best,
Mike

[loopyal]

This is true, you can wait for google to deindex them, but that can take 6 months or more.

You could also wait for the 404s to show up and check the referrer and then manually set up the redirect, but if you miss seeing them, you may also risk the linking site removing the link.

Another thing you could do is pull reports from GWMT and Bing WMT and Majestic to discover who is linking to which pages, and then start with those redirects, then watch out for the 404s and pick them up as you discover them.

If you do want to push google along with removing the old pages, you can do it by requesting them in WMT. 12,000 isn't really many, and last time I tried it, you can ask for 1,000 per day, but you have to do them one at a time. That means either a slow manual process or do it with a macro. I think I've had 20,000 or more deleted that way.