To redirect or not to redirect...That is the question

[nisvision]

We have old product data that is being updated (approx 30k sku's).  Most of the old pages have been indexed and drive the majority of our online sales.  But, the updated products have different titles, H1's, etc and have been re-formatted for the better in terms of usability.

So, should we redirect thousands of pages to the new pages?  Will Google be ok with that?...or should we reformat the current url's with the new data?  And, if we reformat current url's with new data...the fear is that the on-page elements that the pages are being pick up for will get wiped out, (be it the H1 in some cases or the title or alt tag for another, etc) because it's simply too much to retain them during the import.

Please share

[DJ123]

My vote is redirect them to the new sku data; you will probably drop in the rankings for a while, but I would imagine in a few months you will come back.

The biggest reason to redirect is just business related - ultimately you want your customers to have a good experience and part of that is making sure they are getting what they need.  Once they get to your site, you have to wow them and do a good job fulfilling the order.  Just getting them to the site is just the start of the whole process.

[EGOL]

This sounds a little risky.

I would avoid doing redirects if possible.

If this was my site, I would get into my analytics and find out which 100 pages are pulling in most of the sales from people who enter from search.   I would then spend whatever time it takes to recode about five pages by hand,  using the best SEO practices within my ability.

I want to make them into something kickass.

After I did the first five of those pages, I would get in touch with a consultant, show her those pages (before and after shots), tell her the goal and have her give opinion on what might be done better.  When I do something big like this I always get second opinion from someone who does more SEO than me and who is smarter about it than I am.   I might ask a question on Moz or get a friend to look at something.   I always get advice from people I trust when doing this.  I don't worry about cost.   One taken opportunity can be worth literally a million dollars in the long term.  One screw up can cost many thousands of dollars immediately and millions over time.

So, after these consults I would launch a few dozen hand-crafted pages and see what happens.  A couple weeks later I would launch  more if the results were good.

The higher the value of these pages the more that I would do by hand.  Once I thought that I had things under control then I would write or have written a program to do the rest of the job automatically.

I am never in a hurry on a high value job like this.