The Basics of Moving Content for SEO

The 301 process can become difficult when changes result in movement of large quantities of content. For example, when you change your domain name, every single piece of content on your site will move to a new URL, even if the site architecture is identical (www.olddomain.com/… moves to www.newdomain.com/…).

This is challenging because you might have to set up individual 301 redirects for every single page on the site, as in this example:

In this simple example, we would have to set it up so that all 1,000 pages on the old domain redirect to the same content on the new domain. In some systems, these need to be set up one at a time, so it could be quite painful. Imagine a site with 1 million pages!

However, publishers who use an Apache web server (Unix and Linux servers) can take advantage of the power of Apache’s mod_rewrite module, which can perform the redirect of every URL on the old domain to the same URL on the new domain in two lines of code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain\.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The preceding code presumes that you prefer the “www” version as the canonical URL. You can also use two similar lines of code to specify the “non-www” version as the canonical URL (see http://hamletbatista...el-of-http-301/ for examples without “www” and other alternative approaches).

When you are moving a site with lots of pages from one domain to another, that’s a beautiful thing! You can also use this sort of scalable approach for other large-scale content moves. The details of the instructions depend on the exact nature of the content move you are making.

The other highly popular web server is IIS from Microsoft. In many installations of IIS, you will find yourself in a situation where you have to implement a separate instruction for each page, one at a time.

However, rewrites can be done on IIS too, with the help of an ISAPI plug-in such as ISAPI_Rewrite. When this is installed you can perform large scalable rewrites in a language similar to that used by Apache’s mod_rewrite.

The first stage of dealing with a site redesign is to figure out which content will be moved where and which content will be removed altogether. You will need this to tell you which URLs you will need to redirect and to which new locations.

To do this you must start by getting a complete map of your URLs. For many websites this is not as simple as it sounds. Fortunately, tools are available to make the job easier. Here are some ways to tackle this problem:

These tools should help you assemble a decent list of all your URLs. One way to do this is to lay it out in a spreadsheet, which might end up looking like Table 10.1.

If you are redirecting a massive number of URLs, you should look for ways to simplify this process, such as writing rules that communicate what you need to know. We could abbreviate the list in Table 10.1 to the short list in Table 10.2.

Then you can save the individual lines for the more complicated moves, so your resulting spreadsheet would look like Table 10.3.

The purpose of this is not to write the code for the developers, but to efficiently give them a map for how the content movement should take place. Note that the spreadsheet should contain a map of all changed URLs, which may include downloadable content such as PDF files, PowerPoint presentations, Flash files, multimedia, or any other such content that is being moved.

You should also note which content will no longer exist. You can do this as additional entries in the left column, with the entry in the right column indicating where users looking for that old content should be remapped. Now your spreadsheet might look like Table 10.4.

The new entries show what should happen to eliminated pages. The first two eliminated pages may represent products that you no longer carry, so you redirect them to the closest existing product you have. The third eliminated page represents one where there is no direct good fit, so we chose that we want to redirect that one to the parent page for that topic area.

Ultimately, the reason for this detailed mapping is that we want to preserve as much link juice from the old URLs as possible while providing the best user experience for people who arrive at the old URLs.

The big downside to all this is that the search engines won’t necessarily adapt to these moves instantaneously. Many sites temporarily lose rankings after making a large-scale content move, then recover after a period of time. So naturally, the question is, how long will it take to get your rankings and traffic back?

The reality is that a number of factors are involved, depending on your particular situation. Some examples of these factors might include:

If you are moving to an entirely new domain, you can aid the process in Google by using the Change of Address tool inside Google Webmaster Tools. Before using this tool make sure that both your old domain and your new domain are verified in Webmaster Tools. Then, on the Webmaster Tools home page, click on the old domain and under Site Configuration click “Change of address.” Then select the new site.

When all is said and done, a reasonable estimate would suggest that a significant traffic dip from the search engines should rarely last longer than 60 to 90 days, and many are picked up in a dramatically shorter time span.