Damaged SEO Rankings?

[ZonkDonkey]

Hey guys, maybe you can help me out a bit. I have a client that has a ecommerce website with about 400 pages of products. He has adsense campaigns pointing to those domains and backlinks to the domains as well.

My question is, if I create a brand new website for him with new URL's (that are different than what he all ready has), how will that effect his rankings? Will they just get re-indexed and stay the same or will the rankings drop?

If you have been in this situation, I appreciate any feedback.

Thanks for the guidance,
ZD

 

[Enigma32]

YES! It is best to 301 redirect the old page url's to the new ones.

 

[neo]

Are you going to create the new site on a new domain name?
In that case, if the original site is aged and well indexed, the new site with same content will be trated as duplicate and hence the original site will continue to rank well.

If you are going to use the same old domain and just change the URLs, you could use a 301 redirect or canonical refence to the new URLs. Is the site built on wordpress? WP got a plugin to do this.

-Neo

 

[volund]

Hey guys, maybe you can help me out a bit. I have a client that has a ecommerce website with about 400 pages of products. He has adsense campaigns pointing to those domains and backlinks to the domains as well.

My question is, if I create a brand new website for him with new URL's (that are different than what he all ready has), how will that effect his rankings? Will they just get re-indexed and stay the same or will the rankings drop?

If you have been in this situation, I appreciate any feedback.

Thanks for the guidance,
ZD

If you take a 400 page website and just completely redo the site and leave all the old urls dead the rankings for everyone of those pages is going to disappear. Plus any incoming links going to those pages are going to be completely worthless as they will end up at his 404 page.

You need to 301 the old pages to the new urls. Even doing that you will probably get some bouncing around but without it you will get nothing but a big drop.

 

[ZonkDonkey]

Okay the 301 is what I had in mind, but I wasnt completely sure. And yes, we will be rebuilding on the same domain name. Thanks guys, I appreciate it.

I will be rebuilding the site in a wordpress format. Anyone have suggestions on 301 redirect plugins?