New website from scratch and redirects or maintaining domain?

[sergio_redondo]

Hi friends,

I have to face a big challenge. My client has an online store with about 250 products. The store is based on a web service provider whose CMS gives critical duplicate content issues. My client is considering to rethink the store from scratch and choose a CMS that offers more guarantees. I have two options:

• Starting the store from scratch with new domain and make redirects (whole domain or page to page?)
• Maintaining the domain, careful to keep the current structure of the URL, which is currently pretty bad

I hope you could help me. Thanks in advance.

[Matt-Williamson]

First thing I would look at when considering the changes your are is how well is the current website doing in the SERPs - does it get much search engine traffic? Is the domain name itself important to the business?

I would look at keeping the domain and look at either addressing the current duplicate content issue with canonicalization or changing your CMS and pointing the old urls to new corresponding ones using 301 redirects. I have done this successfully in the past when changing the URL structure of a site and I didn't have a negative impact on search traffic, in fact quite the opposite. That way you are passing on most of the value gained by any links to the old URLS and then you can concentrate on the new CMS and all of its benefits including implementing a new user friendly structure, without having to worry about the old structure and following it..