Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic

[b.digi]

Hello Community,

What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic?  If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic?  I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss?

Thanks

[Andy.Drinkwater]

The first thing to remember is to point all old pages to the new ones using 301's. Am I right in thinking that the basic content for each page will stay the same? If so, that is quite straight forward.

If you are removing pages altogether, then try to find the best matches for a redirect. Doing this should minimize any loss.

As to what Google will think, that is a little awkward to second guess. Sometimes there are no issues and the site will just carry on, other times you may see a drop or rise in the SERP's. No easy way to determine this.

Andy

[stevecounsell]

Hi,

As I understand it you'll need to map all the old URLs to the New URLs with a set of 301 redirects.

This will tell google that the old page has permanently moved to the new location. You should get all the rank juice but I think you may loose a little.

Hope that helps

Steve

EDIT - I was writing my response while Andy was posting his...

[KevinBudzynski]

As Andy/Steve were pointing out--the key is to as many redirects as possible (ideally all of them). On a large enterprise website this is extremely tedious and resource intensive and most people fall in the trap of just redirecting all pages that had more than x amount of visits in the last year. Unfortunately, the majority of your traffic is the long tail traffic that may be under this threshold and traffics drops after migration.

As for Organic rankings, there is a small decay factor using 301's.

[b.digi]

Thank you all.  301 is definitely the plan.  As Andy pointed out - to "predict" how Google will react to the change even with a comprehensive 301 effort is a miss and hit exercise.