301 redirects for a redesign.

[masonrj]

About to completely redo a client's site and I want to make sure I don't loose our link juice.

The current site is a old template site from another provider.  They host it and we do not have access at all to the site itself, so there will be no transferring of the site from server to server because they feel the site is their property. Basically the site is a monthly service not a product.

So this will be a completely new website, including new URL structure. So my question is how do keep the link juice flowing to the new site?

I know I need to use 301 redirects, but do I rebuild those old URLs on my site and redirect them to their new counterpart or what?

The link profile is not that impressive, maybe 15 back links (all mainly going to the homepage).  But they all are local and coming from pretty good domain authority. But its keeping us ahead of our competition.

Back story: This is one of my local search clients, we now have them ranking #1 across the board in the local packs. After analyzing the traffic, they are losing 75% of all traffic because of the sites design. So a new site is a must.  I build a lot of websites, but have never worried about the back link profile before now.

Thanks for all your help!

[Andy-Halliday]

I am assuming you are not changing the domain name so you don't need to worry about any links pointing to the home page as this page will be live.

And for any pages you don't want but have links pointing to them, then yes 301, nope you don't need to recreate the urls, just add the 301 to servers.

Unfortunately if you are changing some of the site urls, you are going to lose some rankings in the short term but I am sure the new site is much better written for the search engines that you improve - but you will lose some short term rankings

[donford]

HI Richard,

I think you may have stumbled into a bit of a messy situation here. If you do not have access to the old site, how can you 301 redirect to the new site? The 301 redirects are put into the .htaccess file of the old site. Think of it like a "We Moved Sign" you would place on a retail store. You pull into the parking lot and see a sign that says. "hey we moved, we are now located at...". If you're not allowed to use the parking lot, you have no where to put this sign.

You need to make sure your client is allowed to, or at least the company hosting the site is willing to allow you to put in the redirects. To answer your question you need to specifically put in a the .htaccess file on the OLD site to the new site.

You do not have to be concerned with matching URL's only that you format the .htacess file correctly. An example would be (again this must be on the old site server).

• redirect 301 oldpage.html http://www.NewSite.com/newpage.html
• redirect 301 oldfolder/somepage.html http://www.YourNewSite.com/newfold/newpage.html

If you choose to keep the same file structure you can do a blanket 301 redirect using mod rewrite (it must be enabled on the old server). Like this.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^OldDomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.NewDomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You can read more about redirects here at Moz.

If you do not have the ability to put an htaccess file or the clients hosting provider is un-willing to help (they may for a charge) then you're in a bad situation with no great solutions. The only thing I can think of is having the clients old host create a page that say this site has moved and provide a link to the new site. Our company did this many many years ago http://www.columbiaindustrial.com/ when they changed their name and host (before my time). Then you need to recommend how long you would recommend the client pays for this new page to be live... I'd say at least 3-6 months.

Hope this helps

Don

[masonrj]

Thanks Don,

That's exactly the situation we are in.  I appreciate the help.

[masonrj]

After looking running the open site explorer, it looks like all my links go directly to the home page.  I'm not seeing anything going to any other pages.  So I should be ok if I'm not switching my domain name?

[donford]

If you're not switching domain names, just host then the situation is much better because now you have control.

When you switch host you're going to get a new DNS (Domain Name Server) it will likely take a few days for this to propagate through the internet. So expect some initially slow traffic days.

Once the DNS has changed to your new site you have control, so you will want to put the 301's on the new site for any of the old pages that don't have url's to their new equivalent. Just like if you were making new pages on the site. Even if they don't have any inbound links you should still 301 any decent ranking URL's to the new ones you make, since they are likely indexed or bookmarked by search engines and users.

Hope this helps,

Don

[kwoolf]

I was just going to comment on Don's post about your issue but it seems you've cleared it up. As I understand here, you will be keeping your domain name, just building a new site on a new host. Good, good. You're link juice will keep flowing if you keep your current domain, so relax.

Since you're starting from scratch, you should consider using a platform or static HTML site that you will have complete control over. Those hosted SaaS website builders are not what you want if you're here on MOZ looking to rank well organically. I've had really great results with Magento (not Magento Go), so I can safely recommend it. Odoo, WordPress, Joomla, and other popular open-source platforms all can get you want you need in terms of technical SEO features, but you'll need plugins and modules that may affect performance. Due diligence will pay off here.

Your next step is to do your own site index, noting all the page URLs now and either replicate this structure or set up redirects to avoid a hit in rankings. Since your site seems small and your referring links all point to your homepage, I'd say you might be able to skip this step without a major hit. If you can scrape your current site to save for reference, now is a good time for that.

For DNS, I suggest CloudFlare. Read up and you'll see why. Good luck and post back if you have any more questions about this migration. Cheers!