301 redirects and query strings

[SuperCrewSound]

My Current site Subwoofer Enclosures, Speaker Boxes, Custom Sub Woofer Boxes for Trucks & SUVs from SuperCrewSound has great organic search placement. I have new version of the website being built and the new website builders are recommending one 301/401 redirect (for the whole site) to the new version of the site and stating that Google will spider it quicker that way than having a 301 for each page of the old site to the new site. My marketing company say the opposite is quicker. Would you be willing to throw in an opinion on this. I don’t want to loose my placement just before the holiday season.

They new guys are also saying that having one query string (?) in the IP address is OK
Subwoofer Enclosures, Speaker Boxes, Custom Sub Woofer Boxes for Trucks & SUVs from SuperCrewSound - F-150 SuperCrew Cab 04-08 MTX Thunderform Speaker Box (temp site)

The marketing company say I should have no “?” in address
SuperCrewSound - F-150 SuperCrew Cab 04-08 MTX Thunderform Speaker Box

Can you give me an opinion on that as well? Those two things are keeping me from launching.

Thanks
Mark

[jeff.stolarcyk]

Rankings drops occur after a redesign predominantly because of a drastic change to the site architecture. Crawlers come in expecting your old site and get confused because what they were expecting isn't there. When you consider a strategy for protecting your rankings post-redesign, think about preserving the integrity of the information that's already indexed. That will help the crawlers find what they're looking for more easily.

If the original site is simply going to be migrated over to the new template with all the current pages left intact, the 301 won't be necessary. However, if any resources or pages are being moved or deleted, those pages should redirect to that page or image's current location. So, if all of the URLs are going to be different - say, a move from numeric product ids to keyword-based ones - then the old addresses should 301 to the new versions.

The key is simply performing as much preservation as possible and making corrections for the instances where you can't.

[SuperCrewSound]

The titles and descriptions of the products are 90% the same, but I guess that leads directly into the second part of the question which is the URL for each product. These will be different, especially if there is the "?" in the URL on the new site (Is this a bad Thing)? Even if I convert them to standard ID #'s in the URLs, They will be differnbt with the new site, so what I'm understanding is that I should do a 301 for each page.
Mark

[davew]

Originally Posted by SuperCrewSound

The titles and descriptions of the products are 90% the same, but I guess that leads directly into the second part of the question which is the URL for each product. These will be different, especially if there is the "?" in the URL on the new site (Is this a bad Thing)? Even if I convert them to standard ID #'s in the URLs, They will be differnbt with the new site, so what I'm understanding is that I should do a 301 for each page.
Mark

the ? is not perfect for SEO if you can not do a 301 BUT..... Sometimes it is not a bad thing either it depends also on the first line of text on a page, page title, keywords, description etc.. (Top to bottom SEO on the PAGE level is key for great rankings, each site built should have EACH page done for SEO and not just say 1 category or 1 to 3 blog posts per week etc. These are all important but I am stressing PAGE level SEO for best rankings)
so if you have 1 category with 13 products SEO out all 13 pages relevant to those products.


A lot of forums use vBulletin, by nature their stock set up is to have a post id ? in the address, yet that forum software gets ranked very highly in search engines
(example Multiple domains and the license agreement - vBulletin Community Forum)
because it knows enough to still throw out a title tag and the forum post becomes the first line of text.
so check into it and if you can not do a 301 at least try to have the head tags and the first line of text and the product descriptions as close as they were, you can also do a site:yourdomainhere.com in google and it will show all your sites listings, you can then click on the little link called cached and it will show you the last time it was there and what data is using.
You can then use that to see if it is a new page that is up on your current site.

[jeff.stolarcyk]

Originally Posted by SuperCrewSound

The titles and descriptions of the products are 90% the same, but I guess that leads directly into the second part of the question which is the URL for each product. These will be different, especially if there is the "?" in the URL on the new site (Is this a bad Thing)? Even if I convert them to standard ID #'s in the URLs, They will be differnbt with the new site, so what I'm understanding is that I should do a 301 for each page.
Mark

Mark,

That's right. The best thing to do in this case is to 301 from the old URLs, which are already indexed by the search engines, to the new ones. Even the ID# URLs aren't ideal for SEO, so passing the ranking power of the old pages through that 301 is the best solution.