I’m redoing my old Joomla and Ecwid ecommerce site and changing to Wordpress and WooCommerce. Totally different platforms. The domain name will be the same (changing web hosts too). My question is about maintaining search engine visibility (although visibility is very low as my site was penalized by google for not being responsive) The domain name is 16 years old so it has some longevity to it, but I want to ensure that I follow the best instruction for hopefully re-establishing the site in the search engines. Obviously, the entire URL structure for pages, posts, products will all be different. What would you do if you were me regarding 301 redirects? Is there a way to just entirely erase the site from Google and let it get crawled when it’s all up and live again, do people do that or is that a bad idea? Really lost on this subject. Thanks! (Also, you can move this topic to another forum if this is not the correct one to post in)
Well, if there’s no way to keep the same structure for the urls, I’m afraid that 301 will have to do. And yes, you will lose visibility for that but if, as you say, visibility today is low, it doesn’t matter that much. And it is even good to do the change now.
Google will catch up quite soon so the 301 will be only for old links. Watch your statistics and when there’s little traffic going to those old urls, you can forget about them.
Someone else told me not to even worry about 301 redirects except for pages that are linked to from outside my domain, like on forums or blogs and that I can check that through google analytics, so maybe it’s not a big deal after all?
If your traffic is really low, I woudn’t even bother. But if you do have some entry pages, then it might be interesting to put some 301 on those. It depends on your analytics
Yes, traffic is low. I just want to ensure that I don’t cause more harm by NOT doing something that I should with respect to all the new URLs for existing pages.
What about returning customers who have pages bookmarked? Redirects are not only for search engines, but for real people, too. It would be better to have all old links redirect to the most appropriate new page, rather than leaving visitors looking at a 404 page,or even just landing them all on the home page and leaving them to negotiate the new site structure.
TechnoBear, thanks that is a very good point!
Well, she’s a very smart bear. But don’t say it too loud, she might believe the she’s special or something 
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