Website modernization with SEO in mind
I am managing a newly created site that is currently in the process of being updated (completely replaced again), but I am worried that I will lose all my Google indexing (i.e. there will be many pages in the Google index that will no longer exist at that location).
The last time I updated a site (another), someone told me that I had to do something so my SEO would not be negatively impacted. The problem is, I can't remember what it was.
Update for some clarification: Basically I'm looking for a way to map old paths to new ones. For example:
- User searches for an "amazing page"
- Google returns
mysite.com/old_awesome_page.php
, the user clicks on it. - My site transfers them to
mysite.com/new_awesome_page.php
And when Google starts crawling the site again ...
- Google is crawling my site updating existing indexes.
- Inquiries
old_awesome_page.php
- My site tells Google that the page has moved to
new_awesome_page.php
.
There won't be such a simple 1: 1 mapping, it will be more like it (old) index.php?page=awesome --> (new) index.php/pages/awesome
, so I can't just replace the contents of the existing files with a redirect.
I am using PHP on Apache
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You need to put some rewrite rules in your .htaccess file.
You can find a lot of useful information here . This is for Apache 1.3, but it works for Apache 2 too.
From this article, a sample for redirecting to files that move directories:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/~(.+) http://newserver/~$1 [R,L]
It reads:
- Enable the overwrite mechanism.
- For anything that starts with / ~ followed by one or more "nothing", rewrite it to http: // newserver / ~ followed by "something".
- [L] means that rewriting should stop after this rule.
There are additional directives you can use to customize the redirection [301]
You can do:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule old_page.php new_page.php [L]
But you need to have a rule for every page. To avoid this, I would look at using regular expressions like in the first example.
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301 redirect all old (departed) pages to new ones.
Edit: Here's a link to help . It also has several links to other places.
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You can customize the Google look on your site and possibly notify it of changes from Google Webmaster Tools . I think you need to create a sitemap of your current site and check it when the site changes.
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