Rebuilding an old website

[apexcue]

Since we have a strong website; meaning high traffic, but we got 2 issues

1. the framework of the design is not user friendly.

2. the current platform is really old; therefor it comes up with technical problems daily/

We are worried about our links which will affect in our new design, what would be wise to do?

Thanks

[BenFox]

If the URLs are friendly then you could try and rebuild everything but keep the important URLs static.

Failing that you can migrate the pages onto new URLs by using 301 redirects. Doing this shouldn't have too much of an adverse affect on your rankings (not in the long term anyway) and also means you can swap to nice looking URLs.

Alternatively if you want to swap over to a new domain then you can use 301 redirects and the change domain option in Google webmaster tools.

If you're changing the site architecture - say for example because you're editing the main navigation - you will want to make sure that you prioritize your important pages but that's really just SEO 101 and probably similar to what you have in place anyway.

Hope that helps but feel free to ask if you want clarity on something.

[blu42media]

I agree with Ben - move it to a different platform that's in harmony with your workflow and tighten up the loose ends.  If it's breaking daily then that seems to suggest your output code may not be working to its best potential.  Once you clean up the design and make it easier for your visitors you should see some traffic results too.  People stay longer on sites that are simple to navigate.

Do you have someone to handle the upgrade duties?

Happy spring cleaning!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Sometimes you just have to upgrade your platform. When this happens, it's also sometimes a good time to change your URL structure - especially if your old URLs were long, ugly, full of parameters, and in general bad for click-throughs.

As Ben said, if it makes sense to keep your old URL structure (and it's technically possible) this is your best bet. Barring that, moving everything via 301 redirects is not unsimilar to an entire site migration across domains, although it is simpler.

Keep in mind there is some lose of "link juice" through a 301 redirect. I can't give you a precise number, but most SEOs believe it's about 80%.

With this in mind, it's important to build new links after a large URL structural change, and make sure your internal link architecture is solid.

One piece of advice. I would make sure to maintain 2 xml sitemaps. One containing the old URLs, and the second containing the new URLs. Submit both to Google via Webmaster Tools. This way, Google will still try to crawl the old URLs and process the 301, dropping the old page from the index faster. Without this step, Google may keep both pages in its index and ding you for duplicate content.

The process may take a couple of months for Google to index all the new URLs and deindex all the old ones. When this happens, make sure to remove the old sitemap. For more tips, you might find some value in these site migration guides.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

https://seogadget.co.uk/domain-migration/

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!