[McGarryMA]

As the heading suggests I have a wedding based website that I am replacing with a wordress installation pretty much the same content, same meta tagging etc, the changes will be in the blog and some extra plugins. The current site is a static html only webdesign.

My question is....

If I am using the exact same page URLs in my new structure, will I maintain my SERP and hopefully improve on it within a reasonable amount of time?

Or would there be any benefit in creating new URLs and 301 redirecting for the sake of my existing crop of backlinks and avoiding crawl errors etc.

Thanks

This post has been edited by McGarryMA: 02 February 2012 - 10:52 AM

[Jason Dexter]

McGarryMA, on 02 February 2012 - 10:51 AM, said:

As the heading suggests I have a wedding based website that I am replacing with a wordress installation pretty much the same content, same meta tagging etc, the changes will be in the blog and some extra plugins. The current site is a static html only webdesign.

My question is....

If I am using the exact same page URLs in my new structure, will I maintain my SERP and hopefully improve on it within a reasonable amount of time?

Or would there be any benefit in creating new URLs and 301 redirecting for the sake of my existing crop of backlinks and avoiding crawl errors etc.

Thanks

If you have are going to maintain the same URL structure than there's no need to do a redirection because you'll just be redirecting the URL's to the same URL if that makes sense? Only time you need to do a 301 is if you're redirecting to another URL.

All you're doing now is changing the content really

[McGarryMA]

Thanks....

This is a bit of a first, the client has good page rank at the moment I'd hate to mess it up with an unavoidable error!

[Jason Dexter]

McGarryMA, on 02 February 2012 - 04:53 PM, said:

Thanks....

This is a bit of a first, the client has good page rank at the moment I'd hate to mess it up with an unavoidable error!

Understandable, mate.

IF you had a url of /about-our company and redesigned the site and wanted to shorten the url to /about-us then you'd do a 301 redirect.

[Treend Solutions]

Jason is correct above, you could post a few sample urls (i.e. the full url for a page before and after) for confirmation to be on the safe side (unless they are identical then no need)

[ahughes3]

I had a client like this a couple of years ago. He was ranking well for all his major keywords and wanted to completely revamp his site but was concerned about his rankings dropping. He basically wouldn't commit to changing the site as he was too scared of losing his ranking and trade.

So we built the new site, added lots of good content, optimized it and uploaded it to a new domain. Once we had it ranking well we then ported the content over to the old domain urls and did 301 redirects. Site continued to rank well and within a couple of weeks had improved further.

I wouldn't want to do it that often as it's a ball ache, but it's another way to tackle it if your client is really twitchy.

[WebDesignBournemouth]

Even if it's the same content, changing the engine can drop your SERPS, and Site rank. Many people opt to have their site slowly changed over for this reason.

Even if the URLS the same, a new CMS is new coding.