Large corporate CMS migration affect on rankings

[ardell]

My (very large) company is redoing our entire customer-facing website, implementing Microsoft Content Management Server. I'm in charge of the search aspects and have informed management that we will likely take an initial hit on rankings since old links in may be broken, etc. We will be migrating old content to the new CMS in addition to adding some new content.

Does anyone know how much of a hit to expect and for how long to expect it? Also what can we do to mitigate this?

My initial thoughts were: use 301 redirects for as much migrated content as possible, use a back-link report to put 301 redirects in where external sites link to us, and just prepare management to wait for a couple months.

[Chris_D]

Hi Ardell, and welcome to SEW forums!

Sounds like a big job ahead of you!.

The key to making it more seamless than less, is to 301 from each old page URL, to the closest equivelent new URL - for every page as you identified.

i.e. Don't just 301 everything to the home page (seen that before).

I'd also look at getting any external links that you can change, changed.

And I'd be setting the expectation at closer to 4 months. If G sorts it out sooner - then that's a bonus.

[rcjordan]

If your site has a pyramid structure or even if it just has a segmented layout (products, policies, corporate boilerplate, etc) you might consider migrating section-by-section, starting at the bottom --the bottom being in terms of SE ranking. I've been moving a large site filled with legacy problems over the last year with little or no negative impact.

I also paid special attention to index pages as these didn't have to break even if I changed from shtml to php. A lot of my traffic and inbound links came to those so it could be immediately salvaged.