Old and new website

[Thork]

Hello everyone,

I am building offline my new e-commerce website and I am facing a big problem.

My "old" and current website has more than 9000 pages indexed for merely 500 products (yes I know... I chose a bad solution...)

70% of my traffic comes from Google and 10% comes from my website name (the rest is coming from small keyword)

The new website has clean pages with a total of about 400 pages.

I don't know how to make the transition between the old and new one.

I don't have the time to redirect 9000 pages ... but in the same time I don't want that Google discover 8500 pages that are 404 when putting the new website (bad for seo right...?)

So I have yet to find a solution,

Best regards,

Thork

[thegodfather]

Hello everyone,

I am building offline my new e-commerce website and I am facing a big problem.

My "old" and current website has more than 9000 pages indexed for merely 500 products (yes I know... I chose a bad solution...)

70% of my traffic comes from Google and 10% comes from my website name (the rest is coming from small keyword)

The new website has clean pages with a total of about 400 pages.

I don't know how to make the transition between the old and new one.

I don't have the time to redirect 9000 pages ... but in the same time I don't want that Google discover 8500 pages that are 404 when putting the new website (bad for seo right...?)

So I have yet to find a solution,

Best regards,

Thork

Depends on what system you use I suppose? You should be able to insert a redirect policy on the folder level of a site that tells the spiders and browsers to 301 all pages within that level to the new page?

[Thork]

Thank you very much for your answer.

I can't do that because the old website has messed up URL so it is close to impossible to automaticly redirect.

The question is also:

When sending the new sitemap to google, what google will do with the ancient URL?
The best I can do is to mass redirect a lot of URL into one single URL but no more...

[NathanielB]

I would simple setup the following 301 redirects if I was in your position and didnt have the time to do all individual pages:

1. 301 Redirect the home as normal.
2. Redirect all important rankings to there own new page, as these are the pages which bring you more direct traffic.
3. Redirect all other category and product pages to new category level pages. For example:
old.com/cars to new.com/cars and all under that folder
old.com/bikes to new.com/bikes and all under that folder

Doing this would save you a lot of time and should still help keep most of your rankings. But as I said, I would at least make sure to do individual 301s for
1. the main site pages,
2. important pages that already rank well,
3. pages I need to rank well
4. and category pages.

If you use htaccess (linux) for your redirects, check the link in my sig for some default redirects to get you started and you should be able to work the rest out from that, but if you need help feel free to ask and I will share what code I have to help speed up the task for you

[parmesh]

Hi

It may be hard but it is necessary to do 301 redirect other wise you will definitely loss your traffic.

Hello everyone,

I am building offline my new e-commerce website and I am facing a big problem.

My "old" and current website has more than 9000 pages indexed for merely 500 products (yes I know... I chose a bad solution...)

70% of my traffic comes from Google and 10% comes from my website name (the rest is coming from small keyword)

The new website has clean pages with a total of about 400 pages.

I don't know how to make the transition between the old and new one.

I don't have the time to redirect 9000 pages ... but in the same time I don't want that Google discover 8500 pages that are 404 when putting the new website (bad for seo right...?)

So I have yet to find a solution,

Best regards,

Thork

[Thork]

Thank you everyone for the quick answers !

@NathanielB

I am not switching my domain so the name remains the same.
You are right I am not going to redirect categories since they don't have a lot of traffic.

One think that I thought is that maybe the solution is to redirect all the "old" url to a custom made 404 that will help customer to go to the new products?

That way all the old URL will slowly go down in google BUT the new URL will go up (thanks with some SEO)?

What do you think?

I want google to have a clean "url list" of my website.