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General Discussion

Joel Rivera
Joel Rivera
29,401 Points
Posted by Joel Rivera
Joel Rivera
29,401 Points

SEO Site Migration

I was wondering if anyone had any tips on how to migrate a website from a service like Market Leader that hosts the website and provides the IDX Service for Real Estate Search, to a stand alone hosting account without impacting Search Rankings but integrating a different IDX Service.

NOTE: The website is a Real Estate Website and some links that rank well are dynamically generated.

How could I recreate those dynamically generated links so that google will see them as the same url and not a new url?

I'm thinking 301 redirects but how do I do that for dynamically generated links?

Thanks for your help everyone.

1 Answer

Paul Graham
Paul Graham
1,396 Points
Paul Graham
Paul Graham
1,396 Points

"Dynamically generated" links are still usually carrying a relevant query string that gets you where you need to go. You can throw these URLs up and they always take you to the same place, right? If so, you can 301 them.

Joel Rivera
Joel Rivera
29,401 Points
Joel Rivera
Joel Rivera
29,401 Points

Thanks Paul,

Any thoughts on how to handle a legacy site that has file extensions of html and the site is on page 1 for main keywords but difficult to manage because of size of site and not dynamic?

The goal would be to convert to php file extensions and keep the seo factor.

Thanks for your tips.

Paul Graham
Paul Graham
1,396 Points

The biggest thing is to make sure that all those pages that are highly ranked have their content switched over to the new site. As long as you 301 them, the addresses or extensions should not matter. Google will scan those pages that are redirected to and in a few weeks, you'll notice all the links in Google will convert to the new address. The users themselves will simply be able to click on search results and be taken to the relevant new page.

I can't tell you with 100% certainty that you won't be hurt at all, but you should not receive any big hits as long as you are very thorough setting up 301s. What I do when moving a big site is check the Analytics for significantly trafficked pages and make certain all of those are handled.

Consider though, that while you'll tread water by redirecting those static URLs to dynamic ones, that you'd receive a huge SEO benefit for finding a way to make those URLs friendly. That means instead of /index.php?=393498243098&x=123482439843 sending it to something like /about/. It's not always simple to do this but I think you'll find the SEO benefit more than worth it. I've seen SEO improvements up to 70-80% by making a coherent sitemap and friendly, keyword rich URLs.