Internet Marketing - Matt Bailey [162]
I find that in website redevelopment projects, one of the largest hurdles encountered is dealing with the transition from the old website to a newer architecture. Unfortunately, some companies do not take this into consideration, because it is never brought up as a problem. When the site eventually goes live without the redirects in place from old pages (with rankings) to the new pages, both rankings and visitors will drop off drastically.
Many companies have experienced this pain, only to realize afterward that the problem was that no one accounted or took responsibility for planning the redirects, and the business suffered as a result. There needs to be a clear plan for dealing with forwarding the visitors and search engines from the old pages to the new pages. This is a very important consideration and one that must be dealt with in order to maintain rankings and visitors to the website after a redesign. For larger sites, planning a transition to maintain the links and rankings held by thousands of pages that will no longer exist is quickly becoming one of the more time-consuming tasks.
Surprisingly, the main obstacle to developing improved websites (both architecturally and usability-wise) is the search engines themselves. The method of retrieving pages into a central index for an algorithm is antiquated, because it does not account for improvements and changes in a website. In short, companies are being penalized for not being aware of the limitations of search engines, Google in particular.
The following is what goes wrong:
In a website redesign project, the page URLs of the site typically change. Companies are becoming more aware of search-friendly programming and implementing it into their development. However, when the new architecture goes live, rankings are lost because old URLs are no longer available. The old architecture and old page URLs held the rankings.
Incoming links to the website and the deep pages within the website no longer have a destination URL. This reduces the value of the incoming links to the website, because the destination of the link no longer exists.
To remedy these situations, the formula of applying URL rewrites and 301 redirects is employed in order to match the old pages to their newer counterparts. In a server redirect, the old page is requested, and the server scans through the instructions to see whether there is a new page to deliver instead of the old page. In doing this, rankings can usually be maintained.
Redirected links to the new URLs maintains visitors and their link value, but be aware that over time, that value can diminish. The redirected link is not a direct link; the new page destination may not be the page intended as the original link destination, thereby losing value. It is always best to have a direct incoming link to a specific URL for the best long-term link value. However, for site owners with hundreds to thousands of links, they now have to go back and ask other webmasters, site owners, and companies to edit the links on their sites to point to the new URL in order to receive the full value.
The issue with redirects is that every redirect takes a fraction of server resources to accomplish. A few redirects are fine; however, when working with sites that are taking 8 to 10 years of history and thousands of pages, the redirects become a considerable drag on server resources. Different methods can be used in this case, such as redirecting an old directory to the new directory (redirect the old pages within /old-category to www.websiteexample.com/new-category-content/).
Using this method, any request to any page within the old directory of a website will be redirected to the new directory, thereby reducing the need of redirecting every single page in the old directory. It is the quickest method of capturing the most pages. However, if there