Culling 99% of a website's pages. Will this cause irreparable damage?
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Hi again Ryan,
All the URL's are currently coded as .asp (www.url.com/Rome.asp) and we aim to build the new site with user friendly permalinks (www.url.com/Rome). So in answer to your question, yes, the sites could co-exist.
I'd hadn't thought of doing it this way, what a great idea.
With regards to the site's internal linking structure, I'm probably not explaining myself correctly. I understand that all of the site's juice needs to be recycled, but I'm now thinking that on many of the 120,000 pages there are links with anchor text to other relevant parts of the site, will removing these links, because there are so many of them, ruin the site's authority.
In addition, I would be really interested to hear your ideas on staging a transition.
I can't thank you enough for this Ryan, my head's spinning at the moment!
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The transition I mentioned would allow for a smoother migration process rather then a "cold turkey" switch from the old site to the new site. You clearly recognize the end goal is to create your new site and delete the old site. The good news is that change does not have to happen over night.
You can build out your new site completely and go live with it. At that point you would update any external links you control along with your advertisements, signatures, etc. You would also want to reach out to partners and any sites with links that you can influence. Update those links so they point to your new pages.
The final step is the redirection of your 140k page old site to the appropriate pages on the new site. Clearly you wish to begin with the most prominent pages such as your landing pages along with any important pages such as "Contact Us", your reservation system, etc.
The next step would be applying your redirect rules to the remaining pages. Extensive testing will be required.
You should set up GA or another tracking tool to monitor your old site. You will want to closely monitor activity for quite some time. Specifically look for any issues with 404s and multiple redirects.
With respect to your anchor text, I suspect it was used to sculpt your site so your link value was focused on a particular page for each topic. When you have 140 pages on a given topic, you can pursue an incredible amount of longtail phrases. Now I suspect you may have 4 pages for each area: Rome, Rome by Air, Rome by Car, and Rome hotels. If that is the case your future anchor text linking will be a lot more straight forward.
I want to say "I wouldn't be concerned about the anchor text" but you have a major project ahead of you, you are highly dependent on SEO and there are many opportunities for something to go wrong. In that context, I would share the anchor text would be on the list of things to think about, but the proper redirects is a much larger concern.
A final thought I would offer: this is all high level, generic advice. I would recommend hiring a SEO who could offer a proper evaluation of your site along with a migration plan. Once the change has been completed and tested, you should gain many advantages with your new site. Hopefully they will offset any loss from the migration. Once you are confident in your new site, I would recommend a SEO campaign promoting your new site.
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Ryan, you have given me some excellent ideas here and a great overall structure to make the transition between sites. I can't thank you enough for your help. I will certainly consult an SEO before proceeding with anything, but your insight has given me a lot to think about.
With regards to the sites current pages, the majority of locations only have 3 pages; Hotels, Car Hire & Flights. It is the amount of locations covered that make the site so expansive.
So with Hotels being our biggest earner, my idea going forward was to:
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Use the travel guide's unique content for the hotel landing pages, i.e. [Hotels in Rome]
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Redirect all of the old Car & Air location pages to the new website’s generic Car Hire & Flights pages.
This would mean that there wouldn’t be any location-based pages for Flights and Car Hire. The idea would be to build these up gradually as it would take some time and money to add the unique content required.
- From every hotel landing page we would use anchor text to promote the generic Flights and Car Hire pages. For example, [Buy Cheap Flights] or [Cheap Car Hire]
This additional anchor text should help our external link building and the generic Flights and Car Hire pages would house a search form for users to search any location.
So essentially, the majority of the site would be made up of Hotel landing pages, until we began building the site further.
I can see that your main concern is that the correct redirects are in place.
The site currently has the following URL structures, with locations for each:
Apart from the sitemaps, each have locations with them, for example:
www.url.com/resort_hotels/hotels_in_rome.asp
So my idea is to:
1) Redirect all “resort_hotels” URL’s to their relevant hotel page on the new website, for example,
www.url.com/resort_hotels/hotels_in_rome.asp
will go to the “Hotels in Rome” page on the new website.
- The rest of the pages will be redirected to the home page for their category, for example,
will go to “Flights” home page on the new website; and,
will go to “Car Hire” home page on the new website, etc.
Unless there is something really wrong with this strategy, or you have any instant criticism, I would like to thank you for your help again and ask that if you need anything, please don’t hesitate to drop me a message on here. You have given up enough your time and I’m more than grateful.
Kind Regards,
Nick
[I am using my work’s account, which is why I am displayed as Steve]
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Nick,
Sounds like you have a good strategy. I only have two additional items to share based on your latest reply.
www.url.com/resort_hotels/hotels_in_rome.asp
That url seems a bit spammy to me. Mentioning "hotels" twice is something I would avoid. I would consider something along the lines of the below options instead:
www.url.com/resorts/hotels_in_rome
www.url.com/resort_hotels/rome
I also wanted to talk about the landing pages for cars and air travel once more. Before directing all your current pages to a generic page I would take a look at the existing 140 pages and ask once again, do any of the pages have anything that is unique which can be used for the location based car and air landing pages?
Your plans are to develop these pages with quality content over time, which is great. I hate the idea of having establishing pages for each area, pulling back to having one generic page, then expanding again to location-based pages.
If you sincerely intend to develop these pages on a reasonable time period, I would suggest establishing one page for each location even if it was thin on content to start with. Driving directions, local driving laws, testimonials, anything that can be used as a starting point to hold your footing would be preferred.
If you do pull back to a generic "car rentals" page, I have two ideas. Build out your location landing page for one area such as London. Closely watch your conversion rates on users on the London page versus the generic page. If there is a significant difference, it may help speed up your transition. If you realize you are losing $$ every day you don't have those pages, then perhaps you can hire additional help to speed up the process.
The final idea would be to build country-based landing pages for car rentals as an stop-gap measure. Your Milan, Rome, etc pages could all direct to "Cars Italy" and "Air Italy".
There are tons of choices on the internet for travel providers. You have an extremely well established user base. My top concern for any migration is to maintain all my existing relationships. Some travel sites do great with a single landing page for air/cars/hotels. It sounds like your site has catered to clients in a specific way, and I would be sensitive to maintaining your current user experience.
One last idea that just came to me. After the migration poll users for feedback. Take surveys, offer discounts, generate hype but engage users because they will offer a different point of view which you may not have considered.
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Hi Ryan,
Sorry for not getting back to you straight away, I've been in meetings all day.
You've given me some excellent ideas again!!
Just to clarify, the old URL's are in the following format:
www.url.com/resort_hotels/hotels_in_rome.asp
I am aiming to use the following structure for the new website:
or
I was wondering if you knew from a search engine perspective, which URL is the better option. From a user perspective, I would assume the second.
I am operating under the assumption that Google rates a URL's importance by the number of clicks it is from the homepage and not the number of directories (www.url.com/.../.../...) within the URL?
If this is the case I will probably go for the second URL structure, but place links higher up the hierarchical structure of the site for the more important locations.
Unfortunately, the landing pages for the cars and flights house exactly the same content with just the location text tweaked. There is nothing else unique on these pages, which is why I find myself with no other option but to get rid of them.
I really like your idea of testing landing pages for a specific area. This may be a good way to go, but creating two paragraphs of text for both the flight and car hire pages is not an option at this time. With 40,000 locations we’d need to produce 160,000 paragraphs of unique text, which would cost around $400,000, may be slightly less with bulk discounting.
If I was to spend that much money on content writing, I would probably expand the hotel side of the site as this is most profitable. But my priority after the launch of the new site is an extensive link building campaign to assist the transition.
Thanks so much again for your help Ryan, you're a star!
Did you know whether Google rates a URL's importance by the number of clicks it is from the homepage and not the number of directories (www.url.com/.../.../...) within the URL? It is really important that I find this one out!
Take care buddy,
Nick
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Your understanding is correct.
Google does not care how many directories appear in a URL. The two URLs you offered as an example are viewed equally by Google. What's important is how many clicks it takes users to access those links.
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I do hope Ryan gets "Good Answer" and/or "Endorsed Answer" for this... hint, hint
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Just figured out how to do this, I'm new to SEOMoz Q&A, thanks for the nudge! Ryan certainly deserves it!
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Seriously, Ryan is always ALL OVER Seomoz comments with good feedback
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Thank you all for the positive feedback.
Lately I have made the time for SEOmoz Q&A as I have been doing various SEO research and these boards can be a great way to stretch thought processes.
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