Help on site redesign

[marg]

Hi all – I’m after a bit of help/advice.

We’re doing a major site redesign…new IA, new look and feel, additional functionality and moving to a new content management system.

Most of our traffic comes from Google, so we really don’t want to do anything that would make us disappear from their search results pages…or loose our rankings.

Some of the major traffic driving pages will remain on their current URLs, but at least 75% of our content won’t. While the main content of a page won’t change, there will be additional functionality and text modules added to the page and the URL will change. We’ll put 301 redirects in place…but I don’t know if Google will recognise these as the same pages or not (given the additional content & functionality), or what the impact will be if Google thinks it’s a different page (other than a loss of ranking for the page).

I’ve heard that sometimes Google will penalise a site if it thinks an established domain has been sold and is being used by a new owner trying to make the most of old rankings. With so many changes coming up, I think it’s possible that Google may come to the conclusion that our site has been taken over by someone else. Any ideas on how to avoid that sort of problem?

Any advice, comments etc would be hugely appreciated!!

[alex-party]

Hello,

I'm not sure, but as far as I know - R=301 redirects - that's the way to go. I've done this once for a big customer. They had completely redesigned and changed their site structure for like 500 urls, all changed with 301 redirects. But because of lack of time, I haven't traced what impact it had on their rankings of new/old pages, after all it wasn't my job. But if you look at their web site now, it seems like they have good PR on their new urls: http://www.fulltiltpoker.com

This makes me think, that Google applies PR to all new Urls as well.
I assume, Google takes home page PR=6, and redistributes all sub-level urls PR5 or 4 roughly. If you find answer to your problem yourself, please let us know, as many people here asking same question....

Hint: try changing 2-3% urls and see what happens.

Thanks,
Alex

[marg]

Thanks for your reply Alex.

I'm really hoping 301s do the trick - if I come up with anything new, I'll put it up.