Hi
I am about to undertake the replacement of a simple Joomla site with a Drupal site which for the most part consists of the same bunch of static pages. I am seeking the best implementation strategy which doesn't involve blowing the Joomla site away before the new site is proven to work successfully. Although the page URLs will definitely change ( the current pages in Joomla do not have clean URLs ), how can I best maintain the Google ranking that the existing pages have for the new Drupal pages ?
I can't change the DocumentRoot as my host doesn't provide this access, but can create subdomains if this would help the process.
Any advice or strategies appreciated. This is my first site migration so even basic comments will be helpful.
Thanks
Dave
Comments
Couple of hints - How did it go?
How did the migration got going? How did you do it? I'm planning the same move as yours, from Joomla to Drupal, and looking for some hints and shared experieces.
About SEO, changing a CMS for another is pretty much the same as moving content or deleting it...
You'll find much info on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en, it's about redirecting traffic to a deleted page or a moved page.
Basically, it means...
Subscribe to Google Webmaster Tools, register the Joomla site you're working on. Find which pages have external links pointing at them, this you can identify the "must-keep". Email people who're pointing to specific pages to change the URL pointing from the old page to the new one.
Give the old Joomla URLs a redirect 301 in your new site. To set up 301 redirect, add Path Redirect module to your Drupal site, http://drupal.org/project/path_redirect among other "path modules". Test it all again.
Hope it helps.