URL mapping for site migration

[Blink-SEO]

Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other.

This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work.

By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up.

Thanks!

[mosquitohawk]

Screaming Frog SEO Spider could do that for you.  You'd need to set up a custom filter to look for a copy identifier (ie: a div that always contains the main copy) and have it scrape that for you while it's crawling.  Do the same for the other site and then you could match them up pretty easy I think.

Here is a good resource on different ways of using the tool - http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide  We use it almost daily for a variety of tasks and find it to be pretty flexible.  Good luck!

[Blink-SEO]

Thank you for taking the time to answer. I did think of Screaming Frog, but the problem is that it only records the instances of custom parameters, not the contents. I tweeted the SF team to check and they said it wasn't possible too. I've also tried InSite Inspyder too but tat doesn't do it either.

[mosquitohawk]

Darn!

Another alternative would be to use Screaming Frog to get a full list of URLs from each site, then use a scraping tool like Mozenda to scrape that list from each site, pull the content area and it will create the data structure you want and make it available for export.  Then you can basically do what I had said in the previous email, compare the two spreadsheets.

[KaneJamison]

Just to confirm mosquitohawk's comments, there's not a great way to do this other than sorting through the spreadsheet.

Hopefully URLs have distinct enough subfolders that you can break them out into sections easily.