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We are going to be relaunching our website with a new URL structure.  My question is, how is it best to deal with the migration process in terms of old URLS appearing whilst we launch the new ones.

How best should we launch the new structure, considering we've in the region of 10,000 pages currently indexed in Google.

Perfect thanks. Just one final question, since the site has over 10,000 pages we need to make sure all redirects etc are set-up before we go live with the new URLs ?

What is the best way to go forward with regards launching the site ?

Should we launch the new pages and then go through the URLs redirecting them ?

Thoughts please ??

You can only do a 301 redirect to 1 page.  I'd pick the best performing product out of the 3 and redirect it to that one.

From my experience, I would start to create and add some valued content on your site.  Register a Twitter/Facebook account relating to your website, and post any site updates/new pages via these two channels.

In addition, create a sitemap (keep it up to date), and submit via the Google Webmaster Tools console.  Your site will soon become indexed in Google.  Your next step and more harder step is to gain valuable links to your site.

Regarding the targeting of long tail keywords, since this is much easier - this is something I'd suggest you try first.

Good luck !

We are changing our site structure for two main reasons

1. Ease of functionality, and having the ability to target friendly URLs suitable for SEO

2. Plus we've a new CMS, that allows this custom written URLs

The current structure has too many folders that are too deep, and is becoming too un-manageable.  The new CMS gives us totally control from one control panel.

I understand that we will loose some PR, but believe it will be for the better of the site and user experience.

We are changing our site structure for two main reasons

1. Ease of functionality, and having the ability to target friendly URLs suitable for SEO

2. Plus we've a new CMS, that allows this custom written URLs

The current structure has too many folders that are too deep, and is becoming too un-manageable.  The new CMS gives us totally control from one control panel.

I understand that we will loose some PR, but below it will be for the better of the site and user experience.

We are in the process of changing our folder/url structure.  Currently we have about 5 sitemaps submitted to Google.

How is it best to deal with these site maps in terms of either (a) replacing the old URLs with the new ones in the site map and (b) what affect should we have if we removed the site map submission from the Google Webmaster Tools console.

Basically we have in the region of 20,000 urls to redirect to the new format, and to update in the site map.

How about hosting a site in Singapore, for users in China ?

I understand, however my question is if the server was hosted in Singapore, Hong Kong or China, or Japan would it make much of a difference ?  Or in the future when we launch a website in the German language, would it make a BIG difference if the server was hosted in Germany or say Austria as a example.

Is it best to have lower case URLs e.g

mydomain.com/hotels-in-london/

or title case like

mydomain.com/Hotels-In-London/

I noticed in the seomoz tools that it would report the above two URLs as duplicate if the site had two links using pointing to each URL

How strange that today we check our rankings for the profile pages and they are pretty much back to as they were with regards rankings, including pages that we didn't even modify.

I believe either Google had a problem crawling our site, a DNS problem or a problem with the Panda update they released last Friday.

I was 100% sure before that our content, meta etc was correct and couldn't see why we would of been punished.

We currently have a total of 7000 incoming links to our site, of which 3,051 are pointing to the homepage.

Those two domains above that I mentioned are nothing to do with our company and I don't know why they are linking to us.  Should we inform Google of this linking to our site, if yes - how do I do it.

Further to the previous posts, our problem is 100% related to the title tags and how Google is interpreting them.  For example we have a page with a title

Heathrow Hotels - Cheap Hotels Near Heathrow Airport - Cheap London Hotels

but Google is showing the page title as

"Hotels near Heathrow Airport London ( - Cheap Hotels in London" when we do a cache of the page in Google's system

Yes, the other .de site for example will be 100% in the local language.  What pitfalls do you feel we will have if we went the route of many TLD sites ?

I don't think the issue is because something one of our competitors have done to be honest.  It is a collection of profile pages that have been hit.

Currently our domain is domain.com.

But we were thinking about having domain.de, domain.com.cn, domain.es etc.  Are you saying this isn't the way to go ?  We were looking to host these sites in the TLD country e.g domain.de hosted in Germany.

Examples where this has worked very well is TripAdvisor.

For the new site we will be having international TLD like mydomain.de.  Re the GB this is so we initially know what country the hotel is located in, and in some instances hotels have the same name, but in different countries.

Thanks for your useful response.  Will let you know how we get on.