Totally changed site, what to do with Google etc

Zascar

I had an old site on Joomla which had not been updated in ages. I migrated it to wordpress and now made the new site live on the same domain. Any inbound links that would be broken etc just show the homepage - and the first post is a welcome post explaining the site has been redesigned etc and they can search for old topics etc.

I'm wondering if there is anything extra I can do for Google. I want Google to pay more attention to this site from now on as its going to be updated. I looked into my analytics and it does not seem like I have to change anything, and same in webmaster tools. but I was maybe thinking that I should delete both sites and add them afresh, might be less confusing.

Any advice for me?
Thanks

zAbbo

Make sure you're getting stats on broken links (404's) and get these pages redirected to the new content pages or the domain root so you don't lose google juice and visitors.

Zascar

Thanks, how exactly do I find out the stats on the 404's? I have google analytics on it.

If there are a few pages that are getting a lot of traffic, how do I individually redirect them?

Cheers

zAbbo

Zascar wrote: »

Thanks, how exactly do I find out the stats on the 404's? I have google analytics on it.

If there are a few pages that are getting a lot of traffic, how do I individually redirect them?

Cheers

You'll be able to see them in Webmaster tools under Crawl errors, there's a Wordpress plugin called redirection which lets you setup individual redirects from the Admin interface, or you can do it manually with .htaccess and 301 redirecting

Zascar

Brilliant, Cheers Zabbo!

Zascar

Actually one more question:

Looking at the Redirection plugin, it looks fantastic. However, the way I have it set currently is if they click on a link from a site or search engine pointing to a post on the old joomla site, they are just presented with the homepage - and a 'welcome' post.

I like this as they are more likely to have a look through the site and possible subscribe/bookmark instead of just bounce when they have read the article if I do a 301 redirect. However, if I leave it the way it is, is this bad for the search engines?

To give you an example: the first result of this search points to a link on the old joomla site. The only thing is it says 'nothing found' for the page title. Is this bad?

zAbbo

Zascar wrote: »

Actually one more question:

Looking at the Redirection plugin, it looks fantastic. However, the way I have it set currently is if they click on a link from a site or search engine pointing to a post on the old joomla site, they are just presented with the homepage - and a 'welcome' post.

I like this as they are more likely to have a look through the site and possible subscribe/bookmark instead of just bounce when they have read the article if I do a 301 redirect. However, if I leave it the way it is, is this bad for the search engines?

To give you an example: the first result of this search points to a link on the old joomla site. The only thing is it says 'nothing found' for the page title. Is this bad?

If you think about it, Google came across your website, indexed some good content - so when someone searched for a topic - your site was returned in results.

Run a search to see what's indexed - http://www.google.ie/search?q=site%3Awww.digital.dj

Probably a lot of legacy Joomla folder/tag formats.

If you've just moved that content elsewhere, link the indexed URL with the new content URL with a 301 redirect (content permanently moved)

What you're doing now by redirecting to the homepage (or a welcome post) will lose you search ranking as well as annoying the visitor, Remember Google's goal is to get a visitor off the google homepage and keep them off it, with relevant SERP's

If you migrated correctly, there is probably a plugin or guide where someone advises on how to link Joomla to wordpress permalinks.

Other advice would be to utilise the Webmaster tools as much as possible, especially sitemaps, but sort out the redirection issues first.