Moving 70 page .html site over to cms without losing search engine rankings

[jfin]

I have a site with 70 pages that are all www.mydomain.com/page.html  Each page is ranked very well in the search engines for different keywords and each page has multiple back links pointing to them.

As the site grows it is getting more and more time consuming to maintain and organize, I would love to plug the entire site into the easy cms script because it would be much easier to organize and make site wide changes etc...(I wish I had started with a cms from the beginning)

My questions are, can I move each page into the cms script without harming my search engine rankings?  I assume that I could use .htaccess file and redirect the old pages ending in .html to the new pages created by the cms? 

Does anyone know if this is doable and or am I going to run into problems and lose my rankings?

Question#2 - Has anyone had any great success with SEO using this easy cms script?

Any feedback from anyone that has experience with this kind of task would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[JohnnyB]

Well for question one, using htaccess for redirection is the proffered method.  I would actually discover all of the pages you have indexed and then create a 301 redirection for each page instead of redirecting the old pages ending in .html to the new pages created by the cms, because CMS MS can be setup to have a file ending (like .html or .php) or not have a file ending.  SO the url would look like http://yoursite.com/about/ vs http://yoursite.com/about.php for example.

I suppose if you were careful, you could just tell CMS MS to end file with .html to preserve your current site page, sturcture, and SE Rankings.

Question#2 - Has anyone had any great success with SEO using this easy cms script?

I'm fairly new to CMS MS and I've only built a few sites so far.  So, I can't say much about long term search engine results. But, I've successfully recreated old static sites to dynamic sites with CMS MS using 301 redirection in htaccess.

CMS MS is very Search Engine friendly.  URL Rewriting is easy and there isn't a lot of bloated code to muddle with your page content making indexing very easy.

[cyberman]

Have you seen this utility?

http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/projects/movedpages/

[Pierre M.]

Hello jfin, welcome to CMSms !

I have a site with 70 pages

ok, good.

that are all www.mydomain.com/page.html

nice naming convention.

Each page is ranked very well in the search engines for different keywords

you must have good content.

and each page has multiple back links pointing to them.

indeed, this is powerfull to get good ranking.

As the site grows it is getting more and more time consuming to maintain and organize, I would love to plug the entire site into the easy cms script because it would be much easier to organize and make site wide changes etc...(I wish I had started with a cms from the beginning)

I agree. I think using a CMS is better from 4 templates and about 15 pages. Then your site can go to 150 pages easyly.

My questions are, can I move each page into the cms script without harming my search engine rankings?  I assume that I could use .htaccess file and redirect the old pages ending in .html to the new pages created by the cms? 

Does anyone know if this is doable and or am I going to run into problems and lose my rankings?

Question#2 - Has anyone had any great success with SEO using this easy cms script?

Good news : you can motorize your well done static site with CMSms and keep your ranking.
As CMSms is flexible, you have several ways to do it :

plan A) make a CMSms site with pretty URLs that are the same as your static site (with nice .html postfixes).
May be the easiest way. See http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... l_Settings "Pretty URLs and mod_rewrite".

plan B) make a CMSms site with pretty URLS (still .html) that are not the same of your current site.
For example, if you want to introduce hierarchical URLs like /products/teapot.html and /services/delivery.html.
If your site has true content formated in HTML, I respectfully advice you to keep the nice .html postfixes.
As mww and Cyberman have said, you can make 301 redirects from the old web server to the new pretty URLs, either with .htaccess tuning or using the moved pages module. Again, this is your choice, given by flexibility and conformance to webstandards.

May be you can try first with only one minor URL, wait for one month for the crawlers to respond to the change and evaluate if it is ok for the whole migration ?

BTW, other thing : you can also manage your content on a locally installed CMSms and still broadcast it as static files on your webserver, using httrack or similar.

Have fun !

Pierre M.

[cnymike]

Pierre, great information.

Could you go into a little more detail about "httrack or similar"... is this a method to export a CMS site to a static site?

Michael

[Pierre M.]

Try to search for mirroring software on the web.
Like http://www.httrack.com/
On unix, I like wget but it doesn't allways recurse to the stylesheets.
Or you can put an Apache mod_cache enabled reverse proxy "under" your server and copy the cache.
Have fun
Pierre M.

[cnymike]

put an Apache mod_cache enabled reverse proxy "under" your server and copy the cache.

When I read this, I just started to laugh. It was like reading hieroglyphics.  But thanks for the suggestions.

[Pierre M.]

It makes me happy to make people laugh !-)
Have fun !
Pierre M.

[cnymike]

There was a very old Steve Martin comedy routine from the '70's. Steve Martin preceded the joke by setting it up and saying that he worked up the joke especially geared to the plumbers that were in the audience. He then proceeded to tell the joke which had all sorts of references to gangly wrenches and sprockets. It was hilarious because of course a non-plumber wouldn't understand any of it.

That's what reading "put an Apache mod_cache enabled reverse proxy "under" your server and copy the cache." was like to me.

[kermit]

My questions are, can I move each page into the cms script without harming my search engine rankings?  I assume that I could use .htaccess file and redirect the old pages ending in .html to the new pages created by the cms? 

Does anyone know if this is doable and or am I going to run into problems and lose my rankings?

Question#2 - Has anyone had any great success with SEO using this easy cms script?

Good news : you can motorize your well done static site with CMSms and keep your ranking.
As CMSms is flexible, you have several ways to do it :

plan A) make a CMSms site with pretty URLs that are the same as your static site (with nice .html postfixes).
May be the easiest way. See http://wiki.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php ... l_Settings "Pretty URLs and mod_rewrite".

plan B) make a CMSms site with pretty URLS (still .html) that are not the same of your current site.
For example, if you want to introduce hierarchical URLs like /products/teapot.html and /services/delivery.html.
If your site has true content formated in HTML, I respectfully advice you to keep the nice .html postfixes.
As mww and Cyberman have said, you can make 301 redirects from the old web server to the new pretty URLs, either with .htaccess tuning or using the moved pages module. Again, this is your choice, given by flexibility and conformance to webstandards.

May be you can try first with only one minor URL, wait for one month for the crawlers to respond to the change and evaluate if it is ok for the whole migration ?

jfin, this is some solid information. i would add a recommendation that you faithfully recreate your existing site in cmsms using 'plan a' FIRST...  if you want to start using hierarchy ('plan b'), do it later-on... i.e. do one thing at a time.

a few notes:

your site cannot be on a windows/iis server.

if you have a clean, easily dissected layout (e.g. no full-page layout tables), you can probably just copy-n-paste the html source of your existing pages' content areas into cmsms content blocks. i would suggest turning off the wysiwyg editor while doing this.

if you have unique keywords and/or description for each page, remove those from the global metadata and include for each page instead.

existing filenames = cmsms page alias (e.g. existing page ./summer-cruises.html = page alias of "summer-cruises"). you may need to manually type in page aliases as the 'auto generated' one (derived from menu text) may not be correct.

existing page titles = cmsms "page title" field

existing menu link text = cmsms "menu text" field

Question#2 - Has anyone had any great success with SEO using this easy cms script?

it's more about the text & content, site structure, stability of url's, sitemaps, using proper redirects when needed, & all the other 'usual' things; and less about the tool used to manage the site.

i'm far from what you'd call an "seo expert" but i've had some pretty good results on a few sites i've actively been working with to improve rankings on specific keyword combinations.

[Pierre M.]

Hey, folks !
This thread is becoming (to me) a nice "howto motorize your old plain html static site with CMSms", doesn't it ? Where should we write this in the wiki ? Perhaps a "Howto" between "FAQ" and "Visual tutorials" on the main page ?
What do you think ?
Pierre M.

[cyberman]

What do you think ?

Feel free to create it - you have access to wiki with your forum login  .