@rallystocks
Why you even have to ask now...
I'll clean up what I said in chat a bit
The biggest project like that I have done was the relaunch of a huge information portal in 2008.
Pretty much thesame layout as your problem:
* the site ran on an outdated version of cold fusion
* the programming had a very ------- personal style
* and we only had 8 months to do a complete redeisgn, including a change of the tech stack (move from cold fusion + custom knowledge management + IIS to eZ Publish CMS + custom knowledge management + Apache/PHP)
* at that point, the site had roughly 40'000 content objects, so redirecting them one in one wasn't in the cards
It was especially not one of the options because the new CMS would impose a different URL structure on top of the complete redesign of the information architecture we had planned.
What to do in your case:
1 Size matters
Check the site .. how big is it, really?
If it is just 1-3 hundred URLS, writing 301 redirects will be a drag, but is easily doable.
You can just run screaming frog or XENU or whatever to create a full overview and exportable list of URLS.
2 Rules, anyone?
If you can keep the new URL structure the same, or make a pattern that can translate one to the other, you are in the green. Often, this will not be the case, though.
3 Winds of change
You need to check with the client and make sure they understand that they will NOT save money staying in the old environment.
The bad:
Time & Money
Staying in that environment means that every change will cost them dearly, as programmers will struggle to implement changes. Yes, rewrites can be made, code can be refactored and cleaned up...
.. I have sat in / developed and managed way too many projects just like that. It never works and is not worth the hassle. I have yet to see a rewrite in which the whole team did not want to commit suicide halfway through.
Technical debt is a good term to introduce here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_debt
Sudden IT Death Syndrome
You said the website was written in ASP. While support seems to be good for another 8-10 years, good luck finding dev tools, developers and good resources.
The good:
Whenever someone comes to me and says "Let's just slap a new coat of paint on it", I see it as an oppotunity to tell them. It is not "just a coat of paint" because .. (technical debt, system borked, will take as long as coding new, etc..."
Let's:
- Get rid of tech debt
- Make new feautures
- Make it expandable
- Make it Google friendly (schema markup, etc...)
- Make it easier for everyone
- Make it cheaper
- Make money
Grab your sales skills, you'll need em.
**4 Do **
Check the site to see how many individual templates you really need from my experience, around 7 for really big sites.
Usually:
- homepage
- category overview page
- detail view (individual article / real estate, etc)
- internal Search engine results pages
- -3 individual templates for "about us" "staff directory" etc
Here be dragons - what to do without a map
If you can NOT map / redirect (like we could not), do this:
- map/redirect the main pages:
homepage / category pages / internal search
- use analytics to find the popular pages
if popular enough, redirect these
- For everything else: set up a redirect for /category/mystupidpage.asp to /category/
- Make a nice 404 page
Redirect the visitor to the homepage and list the most popular categories on that page. Include a search bar.
People!
One problem is people linking from other sites to yours. They are a problem ecause they are slow to react.
Find out the pages with the most referral traffic.
Find where they are linked from, then get those links changed or redirect them individually.
Results:
if you do it like this, then GOOGLE has no problem grabbing your new site.
Google knows that sites relaunch, change all the time.
- technically, new CMS
- design wise
- informatin structure changes
- new sections are added
- oild sections get archived or nixed
We never lost unique visitors or ranking.
We did lose pageviews, but that was mainly because people didn't need to click around aimlessly to find what they were looking for.
(Good UI killed my pageviews)
Now, 6 years later, that site has more than double the visitors and more than that for pageviews.
Here is the pageview graph from beginning of 09 (relaunch) to middle this year. The line bisects because we added a blog.
You might also feel the need to educate your client / boss on
Key performance indicators
Rankings is a shit metric.
All we (that is, me) care about is traffic.
But that is because I work in a non-profit.
In a for - profit company, all you should care about is PROFIT.
So what if I am #3 instead 0f #2, but pull 20% more unique visitors and all you should care about (being a for-profit) is how much money are we making?
What do you care about getting 20% less traffic if profit is up 30%.
That said, if you want to go the rankings / traffic way of measuring performance
Short term might have a small bump, but that bump will be about 1-2 months, max.
Sad truth; You have those fluctuations all the time anyway.
"nothing to be done, power thorugh it"
Remember; That graph above is literally from the start of the relaunch to now. A relaunch with almost no redirects, completely new site structure, etc...
The point is switching and upgrading to a new cms won't kill serp, it just has to be done correctly.
Make sure the client understands you can NOT compare before/after with a big change apples and oranges that's why you stress other things
- easier maintenance
- new features
- ease of maintenance
- etc.. ( see above)
Google gave us no grief for the relaunch, ever.
Go thorugh the steps above, use every tool google gives you to communicate (XML sitemaps, Webmaster tools, etc) and you'll be fine.
::emp::