Renewing website but afraid of getting indexed pages gone!

Forum Moderators: phranque

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Renewing website but afraid of getting indexed pages gone!

ulijonroth

2:33 pm on Jul 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

Hello everyone.

I have a website with PR3 and more than a thousand pages indexed by Google with rankings.

As I am thinking about renewing the website and using Wordpress on it and I know that I will face some troubles.

I have many pages indexed at Google but as I turn the new site "ON" these pages will not be a part of the new site so I am thinking about making these pages unchanged and tell the visitors to get on to the new website but this is not a good way I think.

I know that I can do this.
When a visitor comes to mywebsite.com/mypage.html the page will lead the visitor to mywebsite.com/renewedpage.html

But the problem is;
When Google Bot comes to old page and redirected to new page it will possibly delete the old web page which has high hits from searches and my traffic is gone...

What can be done while I can redirect the visitor to new page and do not get drops in index counts?

Thank you very much for your help by now...

ulijonroth

2:40 pm on Jul 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

And a small detail ;)

I will nearly mirror these pages with new ones. The content will be the same, maybe small changes in some of them and the images will be changed.

phranque

3:22 pm on Jul 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

why not retain the existing urls?

ulijonroth

3:29 pm on Jul 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

It may be a solution if that was for my own website, but the customer wants the old pages to be seen as new.

phranque

4:00 pm on Jul 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

ask your customer if they have ever heard the three rules of real estate.
in beverly hills, people routinely tear down an existing house to build a new mansion in its place.
the street address doesn't change.

jdMorgan

4:45 pm on Jul 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

Changing files does not require changing URLs. They are different things, and only "associated" by the action of the server. The smart thing to do -to the extent possible- is to keep the old URLs, and change the content.

On Apache, mod_rewrite can be used to 'map' old URLs to new files. On IIS servers, ISAPI Rewrite does the same thing, although it is not always included on the server for free. Alternately, you may be able to find a WordPress plug-in that will help with this problem.

At any rate, keep in mind that URLs are used on the Web, and filenames are used inside servers. They need have nothing in common, as long as the server is told how to 'map' the requested URLs to the correct filenames.

An example is this site itself; There are no static HTML pages on this site, even though the URLs imply that there are. The pages are generated using scripts, and .htm URLs are 'mapped' to those scripts in order to generate the appropriate pages...

Jim

jalarie

8:36 pm on Jul 15, 2010 (gmt 0)

I've heard that you can contact Google with the old-to-new map and they will take care of it and keep the old ranking on the new pages.

But, what about people who have bookmarked your pages?