How to Recover From Unstable Site Structure History

[UplinkSpyder]

I have a site that has suffered several phases of restructuring. Apparently its owners were unsure as to which direction to take when it came to structuring their content and URL schema and subjected the site to several rounds of poorly thought through implementations (i.e. example.com/content/page-title, example.com/page-title, example.com/"silo"/page-title, etc.), all within a 8 month period. I posted the originating question here on this Q&A Forum. I want to thank EGOL and Cody for taking a stab at it.

What would be a good strategy to help a site like the one I describe above begin ranking again?

[BlueprintMarketing]

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[sprynewmedia]

I have had direct experience with this issue.  Here are a few of the things I have done:

1. Make sure the current URLs are rock solid and can be long lived.
2. Ensure all links to the old structure are completely purged from the content.  No good to propping up the old patterns.
3. Get a clear picture of the off-site back links.  No sense worrying about pages that will have no value. If they changed that fast, there won't be many to worry about.
4. For those that have good back links, make a direct 301 redirect to the new page.
5. At the point of low ROI, redirect the rest on pattern matches.  There could be a couple double jumps here but they won't mean that much anyway given #3. (side note, double jumps leak extra link equity so they should be avoided)
6. Ensure your entire site can be fully and easily spidered - before resorting to xml sitemaps.
7. Ensure you have a helpful even compelling 404 page that returns the proper status code.  410 errors are reportedly a bit faster at getting content removed so use if you can.
8. Remove any restrictions you have in the robots.txt file to the old structure until the 404 and 301s take full effect.
9. Submit remove requests to pages and folder. This is particularly important if the site is very large (compared to domain authority) and SEs won't get a full picture of the changes for weeks or months due to low crawl allowance.

Doing these got my sites back on track within a couple weeks.

EDIT: forgot a couple...

• remove any old xml sitemaps
• submit multiple sitemaps for different sections of the site.  This helps narrow down problem spots easier.

[UplinkSpyder]

Hello Lance, please pardon the belated reply.

Your answer is very precise, thanks for elaborating in such detail. Number 7 - "410 errors are reportedly a bit faster at getting content removed" - is a gem. I see the logic behind # 8, makes lots of sense, and so does number 9. Nice recipe for a recovery.

Again, thank you for the insight.