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I run a two year old eCommerce site that has top natural Google rankings for broad keywords. We are moving to a new technology platform, and are considering how best to handle a new URL structure. The URL structure on the new platform is flat and indexable, but our tech provider is telling us the URLs need to change (other than the home page).
I am trying to find out:
1) Why our rankings will drop when changing over to a new platform if we use either 301 redirects or mod rewrite the URLs to keep them the same.
2) If we use 301 redirects to point old URLs to the new URLs, how long our search engine rankings will drop and by how much.
3) If we use mod rewrite on the URLs to keep the URLs the same, if we will still see the level of drop in rankings, and, if we do see some drop, how much faster will the rankings recover with mod rewrite.
Thanks for the help!
- Brian
[edited by: pageoneresults at 4:54 pm (utc) on Feb. 1, 2008]
[edit reason] Removed URI and Keyword References - Please Refer to TOS [/edit]
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!
The short answer is, if you can use a rewrite tool to change the URI's then you won't have a rankings drop (assuming no other parts of the transition are botched up, which often happens too).
Rankings drops occur because the pages that ranked are no longer where the search engines expect to find them; it's like opening a door to a room and the room is no longer there. The engines need time to attach the old content to the new URI's, and (essentially) re-rank the old content at the new locations. During that process, rankings can temporarily suffer.
The time it takes to get back to speed seems to depend on the amount of 301's done, the authority of the site and probably other measures.
I've seen some big sites recover very quickly, and other big sites not even take a hit, especially if only a modest number of pages (percentage wise) are involved. I've also seen smaller sites take over a year to come back and never quite achieve prior rankings, especially if a large amount or all of the pages are involved.
Which is why you really want to go the route of rewriting the URI's to keep them in tact if possible, rather than dealing with 301's, which despite their problems are still best practice if pages MUST be moved.
