Strategy for adding CMS to static site

[polaatx]

Here's the scenario that many of you probably have encountered:

Client hired an SEO firm last year which built him a 20-page static site. Now client wants to get into corporate blogging, offer forums, newsletters, ability to self-publish a lot of text and images.

Obviously a CMS is the way to go. But the SEO firm says, "wait a minute! the site is going to take a hit on rankings" I've shown them code output from drupal and they agree it looks clean, but they insist the current static pages should be left undisturbed, because:


URL's will change
But more importantly: search engines cannot or do not index dynamic content as well as they index static content.


The firm suggests keeping the static site and then build new content on a CMS running in the very same directory. The nav menu would remain static and I would have to copy it over to the CMS every time it is updated.

I have pretty much agreed with the firm, until I visited SEW.com and noticed the articles about mod-rewrite and 301's.

SEO is very important to this client. 50% of their business comes from the web. At the same time, they have just begun to utilize the web and there are many things remain to be done that would be done much faster and cheaper using CMS. This is not a big firm. Adding a lot of content using static pages not practical economically. They can't have an inhouse web guy.

My question: are we doing the right thing by putting these 20 pages in this special place of untouchability and thereby acquiring longterm costs of building dynamic content around these pages (and also not be able to display dynamic content within them)?

Or could the problem with URL changes be addressed adequately with mod-rewirte?

How about the claim that dynamic pages are not indexed as well as static pages? Is that still true or an old rule of thumb that is no longer valid?

I am so cautious about messing up the client's ranking that I am thinking perhaps a wise solution could be to build CMS without changing the static pages and then incorporate the static pages into the CMS at a later time when we are absolutely sure that search engines crawl and index dynamic content as well as html pages.

[Jazajay]

Hi
Hope I can help. From what i know about dynamic urls is that google at least can index up to 2 parameters w/o a problem
ie www.example.com/dir1?parameter1=1&parameter2=2
however i have seen 3 parameters indexed properly in high search results.

Also just because you are/will/might be using dynamic urls doesnt mean you cant use mod_rewrite to show them as static ie
www.example.com/dir1?parameter1=1&parameter2=2
would become

www.example.com/dir1/parameter1/parameter2 or
www.example.com/dir1/parameter1/parameter2.html

but it would still be dynamic to you and you could still use the varaibles. This does have the added bonus of being able to add keywords to the urls which may improve click thoughs/give you an added bonus in SEO and looks nicer.

You would want to use 301 not 302. This is because 301 indicates to the search engines that the page has permantly moved and the link equity from the previous url should be passed on to the the new url. 302 wont pass on the link equity and is a tempory redirect that can hurt your cleints ranking over time if it is not changed to a 301.

Now here i come and brust your bubble. A 301 re-direct will mean that the pages will for a short period of time take a knock in the SERPS but this is only temporary. unfortunatly i do not know how long the knock will be it could be hours days or weeks. But there is no reason why it shouldn't recover.

Maybe this is something you would want to talk to your client about before you comemced just so they dont go ape if they get knocked from the results for a small period of time (depending on how competitive there keywords are that is).

Hope this has helped.

[polaatx]

Hi Jazajay,

Thanks for your reply.

You gave me an idea: could i use mod-rewrite to change a URL produced by the CMS to a static URL it will be replacing?

So
www.example.com/home (URL for the homepage of the CMS I use)
would appear as
www.example.com/index.html

If so, would that be sufficient to avoid a temporary drop in ranking because search engines would still find the same URL's as before (albeit they are now produced by a CMS not static pages)?

My CMS (drupal) does not use any parameters. I choose to, everything is www.example.com/url_alias_with_as_many_keywords_as_i_want

[polaatx]

Sorry about my slowness, but I think what I just asked is what you were saying can be done.

So is this mod_rewrite thing is common solution for people in my situation (moving static website to dynamic but want to avoid disturbing url's that already have equity)?

Would it allow me to avoid doing 301's completely or should the mod_rewrite be only a temporary solution?

[Jazajay]

Hi
Sorry if i was not clear mod_rewrite use 301 to move url A to url B

ie: RewriteCond .....!^www\.example\.com
RewriteRule .....http://www.example.com/...[R=301,L]
(bare in mind this is only a section of the code)

What this says is:
if the url is not www.example.com do a 301 redirect [R=301,L] to www.example.com.

so for example:
if example.com
or
example.com/dir1/dir2/dir3
was type in 301 redirect would then redirect it to www.example.com or www.example.com/dir1/dir2/dir3.

Also use - not _ as - as read as a space an _ are read as a continuation.
And redirect it to .com not .com/index.html as shorter urls are better for seo and on the eyes.

Hope I have made this clearer.
let me know how you get on

[polaatx]

Hi Jazajay, thanks for the correction.

What I am still wondering is whether mod_rewrite will preempt any drop in ranking for sites in our situation (where existing static pages are being converted to pages inside CMS) or there would still be a drop?

Also something i just discovered: in Drupal, I can change any URL and change it to a static-looking URL full of keyword directories.

For example, this page:

http://torkzadeh.com/iran/iran_history/iran_tourism/isfahan/Naghsh-i_Jahan/loneliness_of_liberalism.htm

is actually

http://torkzadeh.com/node/535

You think I could install drupal as my CMS in the same directory as the site in question, then just recreate the static page in CMS and give them identical .htm address and that would "fool" the spiders completely into thinking they are crawling the same pages as before?

[Jazajay]

Well basically if you use mod_rewrite 301 it will cause a drop in serps untill the SE reasigns the link equity back to the forwarded demain.

I'm not the best person to ask as i havn't had much use of CMS that i havn't built my self and the ones i do are mainly back end so need no seo. But if it is redirecting from url A to url B i imagine that the CMS will be doing this though a 301 or a 302 (bare in mind 302 doen't pass link equity) If any one else can give a more definitive answer i would be intressted aswell.

But as is say if it is 301ing i cant see how it wouldn't lose equity for a time i could be wrong but dont think so.

Also be carefull about trying to "fool" search engines into thinking they are crawling the same page as before as this is known as page swapping having one page index for seo then swap the page for a less optimized one after it has been indexed and is a black hat technique that could get you penalized i'm pretty sure this is not what you ment but becarefull if that is what you ment i wouldn't suggest it as you can never know when you will be index and G index's sites very regularly.

One other thing i checked out the url and it came up as

torkzadeh.com/iran/iran_history/iran_tourism/isfahan/Naghsh-i_Jahan/loneliness_of_liberalism.htm

to be honest i would make this a lot shorter as in

http://torkzadeh.com/iran/loneliness_of_liberalism

or something similar as this appears as a deep url which may have problems. Shorter is always better.
Hope this helps

[lizcamps]

Also use 301 redirects to resolve canonical issues; e.g. so that example.com would redirect to www.example.com and consolidate the PR of both.

[polaatx]

Hi Lizcamps, I've read about canonical issue. But what do you mean by "consolidate the PR of both"? By PR do you mean public relations?

Is the canonical issue something an SEO firm should have resolved as part of optimizing the site or too esoteric to expect all SEO firms to know about?

[polaatx]

Jazajay,

Thanks for your reply.

I was surprised to see that you recommend only one directory level:

http://torkzadeh.com/iran/loneliness_of_liberalism

I've seen other examples elsewhere that used two or three levels, like:

http://torkzadeh.com/iran/iran_pictures/tourism/loneliness_of_liberalism

Are you sure that latter is not good? Why? I'm just inserting keywords that help SE index the pages better.

[Jazajay]

HI
Yeah you can use as many dir as you want. i like to use only one or 2 this is because google has issuse with large dir

ie www.example.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4 etc..

and might not even index past a level 3 dir from tests i've seen.
I'm not 100%positive if a re-directed url as for example

torkzadeh.com/iran/iran_history/iran_tourism/isfahan/Naghsh-i_Jahan/loneliness_of_liberalism.htm

will cause the same problem if the url it points to is

torkzadeh.com/iran/iran_history

as the orginal dir is still only 3 dir deep. But better be safe than sorry.

To answer lizcamps question (hope you dont mind lizcamps)PR stands for page rank
Page rank is googles level of importance of that page, So for example ebay.co.uk home page has a PR of 7 where as a home page of a site that has just started up has a PR of 0 if it has no backlinks. PR can be quite complicated if you get under the hood. But do you know the equation for gravity no but you still use gravity fine so don't worry.

That said PR is best thought of as a tie breaker if two sites rank the same as in relevance (which is what you want to worry about the most) then the site with the higher PR will be ranked above the page with the lowest this is because sites are ranked as follows

Relavance
Backlinks
onpage factors
PR

there are other factors but worry about those four in that order.
However they are inter-linked relevant backlinks will improve relavance and visa versa as sites that are relavant to you might want to link to you as in reciprical linking(you link to them and they link to you) or link to you as you have relevant information on your site that would benefit them-and onpage factors will increase Relavance.


It's something you really dont want to worry about, consontrate on the other 3 and by default PR will increase.

When Liz (hope you dont mind me calling you that) was on about consolidating PR of both she/he was on about 301ing

example.com
to
www.example.com

This is beacuse if a site links to either example.com www.example.com the SE will index both as two different sites and this can spilt your PR and link equity thus effecting how well you site is ranked. you will also be penalized for duplicate content as both urls will have the same content but be indexed seperatly

to redirect
example.com
to
www.example.com

use this code in your .htaccess file

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.co.uk
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

this says if the url is not www.example.com redirect it to it [R=301,L] this will sovle the problem.

Hope this helps
If not let me know.