Will moving to Drupal affect current search engine rankings?

By icekin on 2 Apr 2006 at 02:34 UTC

I have a website of a friend which is made up of over 8000 static HTML pages. I am moving it over to Drupal to make it easier to manage. His site has ranked top in search engine results for over a year in certain keywords and he is using this as a key point in selling advertising space. If the site is drupalized, then I assume spiders will have to re-index all the pages again. How long will it be before he can regain his spot in the search results? Is there any chance moving to drupal will permanently affect his search engine placement?

Comments

URL Alias

bugz_nz commented 2 April 2006 at 03:21

Search engines may start reporting a whole bunch of 404 errors based on the pages having changed name - it is possible that you could use the URL alias system to point existing urls to the new drupal pages.

I have heard that there may be problems associated with having lots of aliases but haven't had any problems myself so far...

Yeah, I thought of using the

icekin commented 2 April 2006 at 04:24

Yeah, I thought of using the alias system as well, but then I would have to name every alias to end with a .html since the current site is all static. Besides, I also wanted to adopt a new convention for assigning aliases since the current site is all messed up in the way the html pages are named. Is there anyway I can instruct the search spiders that this is a newer version of the old site and hence avoid losing the search engine placement?

I know for a fact that inbound links affect pagerank, but the new index page should be having the same number of inbound links since the main site URL is the same. The problem is if people have linked to the other pages on the site. Those links would become broken and hence not add to my pagerank. I could add a redirect page for all those broken pages, but that would increase the size of the site unnecessarily.

Can I add multiple aliases to a single page?

Yes you can

Cool_Goose commented 2 April 2006 at 04:55

Yap you can add multiple aliases to a single page.. also you can use pathauto to make aliases automatic for you ;) + use node(keywords) to have description and meta-keywords :P.
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You can

bugz_nz commented 2 April 2006 at 06:45

You can add as many aliases as you want to any page and the page itself will be accessible by any and all paths.

For example, if you had a page called widgets:

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html

then created a new page with the same content in drupal with the following path:

http://www.mysite.com/node/45

you could create an alias for this page so that any links/bookmarks that go to:

http://www.mysite.com/widgets.html

will automatically go to that page and will not report any errors to the search engine, this means that your rank will not be affected negatively.

You could also have another alias that pointed to:

http://www.mysite/widgets

All 3 aliases will go to the same page.

The drawback for you, will be the huge number of aliases that need to be created.

You could also create a

kkaefer commented 2 April 2006 at 07:14

You could also create a .htaccess file that redirects the present URLs to the new clean Drupal URLs with RedirectPermanents. If you send real 301 Moved Permanently headers, search engines will change the URL rather quickly.

Use the 301s

grcm commented 2 April 2006 at 09:20

As timcn says, use Apache to send correct 302 replies; this will mean Google et al will keep the ranking and index the new page.
I changed URLs recently and had no problems keeping my old "karma"; and I really feel Drupal helps in the rankings as well.

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I'd probably suggest using

brashquido commented 11 April 2006 at 00:42

I'd probably suggest using the redirect option as well if given a choice. Google may degrade your content as duplicates if you have multiple aliases pointing to the same nodes.