How can we minimize the SEO impact during a major platform migration?

[outofboundsdigital]

We are preparing for a major platform migration with an ecommerce client. The website is in the range of 7000 pages. During this migration, all URLs will change due to differences in the platform and improvements to the site structure. Unfortunately, they run on a Microsoft server, so doing 301 redirects also tends to be a painful process.

What can we do to minimize the initial dent this puts in the website traffic?

We are

• prepared to submit XML sitemaps to Google and Bing as soon as the new site is live.
• writing 301 redirects for all pages which have inbound links (this is tough to automate due to the URL structures).

In the long run, we expect the new platform, URL structure, and site architecture to be a huge improvement for our organic rankings. The client and we are worried about the transition period though!

Any tips or advice to help us through it?

Thanks!

[Maximise]

If done carefully you may not see much (or any) drop in traffic. I've recently restructured the entire URL structure of a website and saw no drop in traffic or rankings. This was also on a Microsoft Server and I used this software for the URL rewriting - http://www.isapirewrite.com/

As long as all your 301 redirects are configured correctly (test thoroughly in your test environment before going live) the transition from the old URL's to the new URL's should be pretty seemless. It would be a good idea to submit a new sitemap shortly after the changes have been made to let the search engines know what your doing.

[danrawk]

I've been through this a few times, and as per Maximise, make sure those 301 permanent redirects are 1.) correct and 2.) in place. That will make the whole process 100% easier.

Be prepared for some bumps. If your site gets cached everyday you will work through them faster than if it only gets cached every 5 days - 2 weeks. Your less relevant pages may take a little longer to get re-indexed. BUT, seeing as how you have set up 301's you should be fine!

Dan

[MarcLevy]

The steps you are taking and the answers above are pretty much spot on.

The only thing not said here which will be worth doing is getting in contact with important webmasters who link to you and getting them to change the links to the new URL. Depending on how many links you have and their value I would not necessarily do this for all links, but definitely the powerful, important ones and the easy ones i.e. Social profiles you may have created.

Something else which maybe interesting to try is getting some quick social signals out to your important URLs once they go live. Tweets etc.. just something to think about.

[outofboundsdigital]

Hey thanks. is there some tool or feature in google webmaster account that shows us info about the caching frequency?

also, we only set up 301's for 400 of the 8,000 urls. only those 400 hand external links to them. it would be a massive project to redirect all those other 7,600 urls. do we need to do that?