Affect on SEO/rankings when site revamped?

[SonFisher]

My SEO and Web design firm has only been around for a little over a year and we're holding our own locally. But, I have a couple of client situations that bring me to the forum to ask the following questions:

1. I have a client that wishes to transition from the current domain, look and feel, to a new domain, look and feel. They would like this transition to move as seemlessly as possible. They understand that the whole move may take many months to complete. Anyone wish to offer some pointers about how to do this and still hang on to the good traffic flow the 'old' domain has earned?

2. I have a different client who I got after a web developer completed a total revamp of their website. The new design is well organized and visually gorgeous, but now I have some excellent rankings that are still attached to pages that were in a subdirectory that has been removed since the revamp was completed. Yet the client has voiced some complaints about the "orphaned" rankings ...

Is there something I can do to move things along and help such transitions happen more smoothly?

I highly value both clients and wish to keep their names / URLs off the forums. If you need more details I can send the info separately and in confidence.

[toprank]

For #1, do a 301 redirect after the new domain is launched. Also, contact all sites linking to the old domain and request they update to the new domain. Try to maintain page naming conventions to avoid what's happening in your situation #2.

Also for #2, you should be able to redirect pages and directories on the host server to the corresponding new pages/directory. Plus, add a custom 404 page (sitemap) to catch any wayward traffic that does not hit a current page.

These are tactics that worked for us when our parent company name (and domain) changed.

[SonFisher]

Thanks for the feedback!

For #2, I had thought of putting the pages and directory back after editing each to add the forward to corresponding new content. But, I am a little leary of doing this, thinking there may be some negative consequences from the SE's.

I had also thought about changing the meta tags to show "noindex,nofollow" and give them an expiration date after about 90 days.

Any comments on this approach?

[toprank]

Another option would be to place a robots.txt file indicating the directory and pages that should be eliminated from the SE cache as well as adding a <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW">
tag on each page to be excluded from future indexing.

[SonFisher]

All of the above dialog seems to help remove "old" cached pages, but can we do anything more to transfer some of the good rankings of old pages to the new ones?

[toprank]

Properly optimized, the new pages should eventually rank as well as the old pages. Unless you kept the same file naming and directory structure, there is no practical way to "transfer ranking".

To get current traffic to the old pages over to the new site, use smart 301 redirection or use page level redirection. Doing that does not hurt the destination page ranking.

[Evelyn Reiss]

When you say "page level redirection" do you mean via META refresh or something else?

[toprank]

Yes. For example:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=page.htm">

[SonFisher]

Well the long story finally concluded for the two clients I mentioned in this thread.

#1 - We got them migrated over and all the good rankings followed rather quickly. Never did really get a 301 error code to generate properly though.

#2 - Apparently my ability to explain what was going on did not satisfy them enough they cut us loose and they are (as far as I can tell) doing poorly. They apparently haven't gotten someone new to help them out either as my links are still on every page and their links page. Go figure.