Best way to update a site while minimizing downtime

[nametaginc]

Hello everyone,

The web team at my company has been and is continuing to work on revising our website. The revision is going to be a major one and as such, we aren't really able to update/revise the site in bits and pieces.

We are creating the new site using CSS: we plan on completing all the changes and then will upload all the pages and revisions at once. Due to the infrastructure changes of the new site, some of the pages that are on the current/old site will need to remain on the new site but will be 301 redirected until the SEs are aware and have indexed the changes.

From what I've read a change of this scale will draw the attention of the SEs. My question is...is the method we are going about to make the changes the best way to do so?

- I've read that others have had their site disappear from the SE results until their site has been reindexed...will an instantaneous switch from the old site to the new one leave us at the mercy of the SEs to reindex us with the changes?

- Is setting up 301 redirects the best way to pass the optimization of the old pages that have been indexed and rank well, to the new pages that will replace them?

- Lastly, for anyone that has gone through something similar to this...approximately how long did it take for the SEs to see and reindex your revisions?


Thanks in advance!

[kevsta]

how big a site and how much is it changing? are many (ranking) pagenames & urls changing? ..is the main question.

if they are you must 301 the old pages to the new ones otherwise you'll drop like a stone. & yes 301 is the absolute best (only) way to hold onto serps.

we just did it to a 20k page site with minimal upheaval to serps but there weren't too many url / filename changes, so Google just recached the whole thing over about 3 weeks.

[Dubbya]

You will take a hit, there's no doubt there, but you're wise to implement as many 301's as possible to minimize the impact of the overall change.

Don't forget to create a new sitemap and robots.txt file. Be sure to submit them when you update.

Use Xenu Link Sleuth to check for broken links and missing pages.

After you've been indexed, check your Webmaster tools pages for 404's and spidering errors. Ensure that any outdated IBL's are covered with 301's and fix any errors ASAP.

Don't worry too much though. While one does tend to panic, it's normal to see your rankings drop for a few weeks until things even out. They'll bounce back.

Looks like you've done your homework though, so do what you can to minimize the flux and try to relax.

.02

[joer80]

I took all of my pages, and copied them, adding the letter x to the end of the file name.

I wrote code that grabbed the users ip address. If it was mine, show the new include file. (Add an x to the filename to import)

[Peter (IMC)]

Just build the whole site on another IP address so you can test straight online. The 301's are a good idea too, to not lose the visitors that find the old pages in the SERP's + they help the search engines find the new pages quickly.

If the whole thing is optimized, then what you will see is an increase in visitors from the day that you put the new site online. (We do this a couple of times a week and it goes like this in 99% of the cases.) Unlikely that you'll see a reduction in the number of visitors.

However, if you start monitoring for a couple of specific keywords, then you might get dissapointed. You have to look at over all traffic, not a a couple of specific keywords.

[bj]

One of the reasons I've gone to using dynamic scripting for sites is that it's so much easier to implement a change of this sort, since all the data is in the database, all the html structure is in the template, and you simply drop in the new skin and turn it on. No worries about broken links, and no url changes, so no canonical headaches or 404 worries or other stuff of that sort. Though internal html structure can change, and there may be some shifting in SERPS due to that, the hit is very minimal and very short lived.

I know you're not going to do that this round, but you may consider it for next time. And next time seems to come in 3-5 year integrals. Do you really want to go through this page by page headache next time?

[vijaysaki]

If i were you if the site is not too big I would actually name the files the same.

You are thinking about pushing new site all at once is a good idea. But 301 redirect i dont know. If you used 404 and databased the old page contents and on the head if you leave it as 404 (or depending on the page name you cleverly redirect to the newer appropriate pages) SEs will soon forget those pages and index the new pages. That way people will visit you page but soon it will be gone and new indexes will appear.

Another solution good be the 404 can carry your newer look with old content...

I dont know if it helped

[Orion]

I know of no other way to do it

upload new pages overwriting old ones and adding new ones

Definitely 301 the pages...

immediately update your google site map and yahoo URL list and resubmit them in your webmaster control panel.. that gives you quicker reindexing...

find all your IBLs and get them updated to link to the new pages (if they are different)...

[B0B]

I assume we are talking about structural changes, adding, deleting and changing entire sections of the site. I assume it’s a big site. I also assume that it's up on a temporary IP, fully tested, optimized and everyone is happy with it. This includes the CSS, site map and everything. I would run some search bot tests on it to make sure everything is visible and can be easily indexed. Set the robots.text file so the bots don't accidently find anything. You don't want to take a hit for duplicate content while testing.

Keep the page URLs the same for similar keyword optimized content, if you can or for as many pages as you can. New pages with new URLs whose content (closely) maps to a new page use server side redirect to serve up the new (similar) page. If your navigation structure is blatantly obvious to the bots and you have site maps and submitted them to the SEs, they will drop the old URLs.

Bj is right; love those databases, especially if it’s multilingual. A little lookup of what maps where and what template to use and away you go. But you still have to test it and get all the approvals before a major change.

Enjoy Bob

[GonnaLuvIt]

I just did this exact thing 2 weeks ago. I left my old site intact and 301'ed all my old pages to a subdomain. That way I would not lose my current rankings. Then I went live with the new site, now I am slowly getting indexed for the new pages and gaining new SERPs. Eventually, when the traffic has shifted, I will phrase out the old site.