What are SEO factors in re-doing a website?

[bvalentine]

Most of my work now involves converting older websites to CMS-based sites (in Wordpress) and I'm wondering about best practices here.

If I create a "dev" or "sandbox" directory for my development work how do I keep the pages from being indexed while I am working on the new site? Can I "noindex" a directory?

What do I do with the old html files when the new site goes live? I'm assuming I will do a 301 redirect from domain.com/index.html to the new domain.com/, and also on all of the inner pages that have equivalent pages in the new site. But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them?

[ThomasHgenhaven]

Hi Bill,

In your new CMS, you can use this meta tag until you are ready to launch:

In regard to the old pages, 301 them to either the home page or the most relevant subpages. If there are MANY subpages, you can use a Wordpress login to do a quick and dirty redirect of all the URLs that don't occur in the CMS.

[bvalentine]

Thank you Thomas,

I don't quite understand what you mean by "use a  Wordpress login to do a quick and dirty redirect"

Bill

[ThomasHgenhaven]

Ooops I meant plugin - Wordpress Plugin

@SEOmoz - maybe an edit feature would come in handy - the same as available in the blog comments!?

[petrakraft]

There are tons of other issues to think about - I would suggest to make a research on that topix on that blog http://yoast.com/cat/seo/ - there you will find answers to several issues you should think about.

[goodnewscowboy]

_But there will be a lot of old files left that have no equal in the new site. Do I just delete these, or noindex nofollw them? _

If any of the old pages left benind have" Page Rank" ascribed to them, you might consider creating "catch all" pages on the new site so as to be able to 301 the leftover old to the new "catch all" pages and thereby reatain the link juice.

This requires creativity as you don't want to lose usability just to catch more link juice. Not knowing your exact situation I'm not positive this is an option but mention it just  incase.

[ninjamarketer]

Make sure you follow the steps as listed on https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en.

Proper 301 direction, new sitemap upload, change of address notification and retaining your old domain for atleast a year will make your transitions smooth.

[bvalentine]

Thanks for your response.

In this case I am not changing the domain name, but converting the site from html/css to Wordpress. Many of the url names will stay the same, but they won't be .html files anymore.

[bvalentine]

Thanks. It looks like an excellent resource!

Bill

[ninjamarketer]

Sorry. I just noticed that my link in my earlier response was broken.

Here is the correct links http://bit.ly/feg8co