If you are working on a new website you might want to consider the URLs and make sure that you have a strategy in place to ensure that both your users and search engines can find things on the new site when it goes live.
As Tom mentioned in his blog about using keywords in the URLs of your website which can be important to ensure that you are promoting your keywords to search engines and also helping with navigation on your site.
As well as doing this you need to consider the 301s on the website. Your existing website will have been crawled by Google, particularly if you have been doing SEO on the site. To ensure that the search engines and any visitors who have bookmarked pages on your old site don’t have issues finding things on the new site.
When you change the layout and structure of your website making sure that there are full 301s in place is important to ensuring that the impact to your search engine rankings of the new site. 301s will tell Google that the pages they currently have in the Google Index have been permanently moved to a new location, meaning that Google are more likely update the index with the new URLs and not keep trying to index pages which are no longer there.
When putting together your 301 strategy the first thing to remember is that if possible all URLs should be setup to 301 from the old structure to the new, if this is not possible look at the pages in Google’s index, and make sure that these are all 301.
If you don’t have a relevant new page for a URL indexed in Google, for example if you have stopped selling a particular product range then you could either serve a 404 error page, which tells Google there is a broken link on the site, or 301 redirect this page to the homepage of the site.
Ideally your new website structure won’t have that many new URLs as the ideal is that your URLs will stay the same but ensuring that you have 301s in place on these URLs before the new site goes live is the next best thing to ensure that Google doesn’t loose confidence in your website once the changes are made.
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