What are some best practices for moving to a new CMS?

Mani from Delhi asks:

"We are changing a fairly large HTML site to CMS. What are the essentials to keep in mind so that we do not loose our search rankings?"

Recorded on April 23, 2009.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• google
• cms
• ranking

[Iodine74]

I'm surprised there was no mention of making sure either:

1) URL structure isn't going to change

OR

2) 301s are in place to map old/static URLs to their new dynamicly driven URLS with the CMS

[15760009]

Exactly... 301 mapping of old URL's to the new ones. Every time we've made the switch the URL's have been much better for search. panacms

[vignesh89sharks]

Dude make less hand gestures.... you look like....

[shakaama]

@Iodine74 ok but for instance i'm making attorneys dot html still be attorneys dot html do i still need to do 301 redirects? and i'm looking at 301, i dont' get it, how to do it, i understand it, but don't know how to do it. Because like I said, I play on keeping it index dot html / attorneys dot html

I don't even think I"ll change the actual content on the page. just that it will now be a cms.

[Iodine74]

@shakaama HTML doesn't have to match. But URLs should either be identical (if you've already got a good architecture/organization) or you should be sure 301 from the old URLs to the new. There's been a lot of talk recently about the fact that a 301 won't push all the page rank onto the new page/url, but it will pass some. Perhaps more importantly it pushes your visitors to the appropriate page on the new site -- they won't have to hunt for that same content in the new structure.

[shakaama]

@Iodine74 I thought that would be the only thing he would say. I'm redesigning from a crappy wysiwyg to a cms, there is no way the html will match.  I can't eve seen the html, because the wysiwyg used proprietary stuff to form the pages.

But with the cms, I'm going to make sure all the urls are perfectly the same. I assume that's all I need to ensure my ranking doesn't dip too far, and hopefully, some pages will be all the better.

[ericbuhlman]

@Iodine74 Would you happen to know a good software package that will help me assign old URLs to new URLs?

[macdet2004]

nice to be on the safe side :)

[coopertv]

Same here... I'd think the URL structure would be at the top of the list, especially when you consider inbound links. Hmm...