Know-How Exchange : SEO/SEM

It's beneficial to redirect for search engine results but it's also beneficial to redirect to maintain good relationships with customers and dealers who will have bookmarked the pages they need most.

Also, are you the only stakeholder? If I were a marketer or managed dealer relationships within your company, I'd be pretty uncomfortable with you making this decision without consulting me.

Having said that, if time and labor is an issue, there's a reasonable compromise. Most sites get the majority of their in-bound traffic, and their best ranking, on a relatively small number of pages. Somewhere between 5 and 15 pages can outrank the next 5,000. So, choose those 5-15 pages, and put the work into redirecting them.

Spruce up your 404 page with a fresh design that announces "New! Improved!" in an inviting way. Use it to link visitors to your new home page. This will avoid any misunderstandings about whether or not your company is still in business.

Whatever you decide, let your marketing team get out in front of it by announcing the new website changes and doing something akin to a launch, so your dealers can follow you without skipping a beat. That's also a great occasion to remind them about the new "EX-400" (or whatever you sell).

About the risk to your Request for Quote program -- designing an important program so that its chief compatibility relates to old systems, ultimately costs more than making the effort to get it right (i.e., designed for forward facing technology). Sometimes one can adjust just the user interface and a portion of the internal links without having to redesign the entire thing. But, do consider whether the desire to save labor at the moment is taking precedence over the need to compete effectively.

If labor is an issue, you might rent extra hands for defined sections of your redesign project from sites such as www.rentacoder.com or www.elance.com. In the long run, this will save you yet another redesign and help your company be prepared for whatever technological challenges come next.

Hope these thoughts are helpful.

Implement 301 redirects.

Backlinks are an important ranking signal. If you do not implement redirects backlinks pointing to existing URLs become dead-you no longer benefit from them. This not only impacts the URL that has changed, but it also has an effect on the pages that URL links to (PageRank is passed via links).

As mentioned previously, there is also a usability issue in that users cannot access old URLs.

If you can't implement redirects on your hosting account, you should change the hosting account to a provider that supports this. There are other methods like header redirects (https://support.microsoft.com/kb/312063) but unless you're using include files, this is really tedious to implement.

@Peter Chevier - Thanks for the suggestion. https://www.webworkshop.net/auto-redirecting_methods.html I'm thinking either the javascript method or the form method would be best usability wise - but I haven't been able to see if the search engines penalize for these methods. They're smart enough to develop the engines, I'm sure they're aware of this and can tell whose doing this.

I don't see many people bookmarking pages on my site. I'd be more worried about the cache. I'd say 90% or more of the traffic comes from the homepage or search engines (I don't study the analytics, I look at them from time to time.) Like Peg mentioned - I can start on the most popular pages. There's definitely the 80/20 rule with my 130 front end pages.

@KSA - The tech from the hosting company mentioned it should only last until the search engines re-index the site. If it's a month, that's not the end of the world. I thought that one of the metrics for search engines was how old the page is.
That link looks like it would work if it was my server. I'm on an external "shared" server. I don't have access to the points the article mentions.

@peg - The RFQ system has been in place for around 5 years or so. All I had to do is update the header and footer to match the new design. If I can live without the redirects, I could put the site up right now.

We do plan to send an email update to our dealers about the new site. We have a custom 404 message page stating the site is recently updated with a link back to the homepage.

I haven't had much luck with freelancers in the past. I've tried lower and middle end freelancers ($ wise). It would have been quicker to do it myself vs. submitting the project, picking the best person, specifying EXACTLY what needs to be done and reviewing it multiple times until it was done right.
I'm starting to lose faith in outsourcing. The EDI implemention has been a nightmare. Our CRM system has had a bunch of empty promises. I've hired another company to tie up the loose ends to get this site up and its constant back and forth.



@excellira: 301 redirects are not supported on Windows servers. Changing hosts sounds straightforward, but it isn't based on prior experience (we even went to the shopping cart's "recommended host").
I can upgrade the plan, but run into the risk of it now working.





I understand the risks of the old shopping cart. Credit card info cannot be entered. We don't actually sell with it - it's simply a request for quote system that we end up passing on the leads to our dealers. The costs of updating it weren't worth the benefits and the extra time it took. It's said to say that this update has already taken over a year, I can't drag it out anymore.