Scared by 301 redirects...

[Fill-Your-World]

Having decided to move our current store over from Jshop to Blue Park, it has dawned on me that all of our product/page URL's will change, which will mean doing seperate 301 redirects for each page (although will likely only do them for those pages that have a decent ranking anyway).

I remember a while ago when our site ranked horribly with google.co.uk but graet with google.com I was considering doing a site 301 redirect to the co.uk version of the domain name which I hoped would make google see us as UK based...but decided against it due to the risks of a ranking drop (which Im glad we decided against as shortly afterwards our rankings on co.uk shot up by themselves).

But anyway, after researching the redirects that time around, and realising tht most sites will experience a drastic temporary drop in rankings I am now really fearful of having to do this for our products! Some of which we have worked SUPER hard on getting the product pages well ranked, and which now generate a lot of income by being number 1 or 2 on Google.

So am I right in thinking that if we go ahead with this move I should expect this drop to happen- or by any stroke of luck does that usually only happen with whole site 301 redirects.....? :(

[Toni Anicic]

You're changing the URL structure which is a ranking factor so it is possible that your rankings will drop, but not highly likely.

[mattsaw]

It's a difficult one. If the site is redirected properly, and each page is correctly 301'd to it's equivilent page on the new site, then in theory search engines should follow the redirect each time they hit a page, and then re-index and cache the new one. - You shouldn't see any fall in rankings if your on page SEO on the new site is as good as it is on the existing one.

Things don't always happen as they should in theory though. I have seen sites drop in rankings for up to a fornight when wholesale redirects are implemented. Usually these are linked to indexing quirks, something that tends to be out of the site owners hands.

Generally I think you need to take a long-term view - do the potential benefits of the new site outweigh any potential loss in revenue from a short term rankings fall?

Also make sure you have a plan B - if things do go wrong for some reason make sure you're in a position to roll back to the old site and URL structure.

[Andycal]

If you're running on Apache and you have mod_rewrite installed (who doesn't?) then can't you just mask your URLs? You'd have to do some pretty hefty cut and pasting, but it'd save having to stress about 301s.

Secondly, you can just set your country in Webmaster tools. Had a customer come to me with a .biz site that wasn't ranking at all in .co.uk but number one in .com. Added WT, told it the country, five days later - all number one in the UK.