Site backward compatibility for search engines

[jack.hughes]

Hello all,

We are in the process of re-designing our website (www.openxtra.com) and moving over to Apache/PHP/MySQL.

My question is: how important is it to retain our old site structure and URLs so far as the search engines are concerned?

Our old site used non-standard file extensions _html instead of .html. Should we retain the old file URLs to ensure that the SEOs don't get confused. If so, what should the old URLs contain? Should they just link to the new content or retain the old content?

Cheers,

Jack

[fathom]

Now that is a tough question.

Site content orginization and link navigation is very important - but you need not keep a close template to the orginal design.

It's better to look at it this way... The single most important information need to be top-left to right to bottom.

This is both for search engines as well as for visitors.

Also dynamic page generation isn't much of a problem - but the more hurdles you put in the way, database drive, multiple includes, cat ids, session id, and long query strings the more difficult you will make your site assessible to bot, crawlers, and spiders.

Keep you design simple and topically oriented (not numerical oriented) thus making the URL similar to an easily read breadcrumb trail.

Also - if you can auto generate the urls to be identical to your page title (thus each page uniquely different) you will be one step closer to solid rankings.

[jack.hughes]

We are in the process of re-designing our website (www.openxtra.com) and moving over to Apache/PHP/MySQL.

My question is: how important is it to retain our old site structure and URLs so far as the search engines are concerned?

I thought I'd give a follow up to this now, given that the transition has now been made.

Lesson number 1: make sure you have all of your permanent redirects working from the off. and test them all to make sure that they work correctly. It is really tedius, we have around 100 redirects at present (though we should be able to remove many of them soon) and checking them is really boring and time consuming. but you only need to do it once.

Lesson number 2: put a redirect on either yourdomain.com -> www.yourdomain.com or www.yourdomain.com -> yourdomain.com. this has the effect of concentrating all of your links to one or the other. this is good for pagerank on google as google thinks that www.yourdomain.com & yourdomain.com are different websites. it also makes people link to the correct url too, as when they cut & paste the url from their browser they will only see one form of the url

lesson number 3: be real patient, google takes its time to update its index. even though we get indexed pretty well every day (albeit quite shallowly) not everybody does. so it is going to take a long time for things to return to normal. all of our pagerank except for the home page disappeared for 5 weeks after our new site went live. then suddenly I looked and it was all back except that all of the site had a higher PR than before (except the main page that stayed the same). must say that I was really starting to panic and hatching all sorts of plans to try to figure out what was wrong. but you just need to chill out and wait. that is the hardest part of this se stuff is sitting there and waiting for stuff to happen that you have absolutely no control over.

i'd be interest to hear any other experiences of doing this.

Jack