[TYPO3] SEO rankings after redesigning site for TYPO3

[Matthew Manderson]

Bill

You will get problems and it is good you have started to pick them up for
discussion.

If you want me to do a proper review you will need to pay me because it will
take time.

In the worst case he will lose most of the sales originating from natural
search results and so expert help will minimise this.

I spent a few minutes looking at the current site, and the new site.

This example illustrates the problems:

There is a page that refers to label software. Here are the two versions.

current version:
http://www.sheetlabels.com/cdsoftware2.htm
proposed version:
http://www.redrocketbooster.com/~admin/index.php?id=81

Looking at these pages you can see that the new proposed page is very bad by
comparison to the current.

i. The url is changed. You do mention using realurl but you did not explain
your implementation of it. You will want to retain the exact url. It can be
done.
ii. The linking to it from the root page is too deep.
iii. The actual text is changed and much reduced as well as adding a lot of
other non relevant text.

My opinion, you will lose that current page rank of 3/10 and you might not
get it back. The change is too great and it is no longer the same page.

There is no use adding a fancy redirect to the new version of the page.
Google will reply, Thanks for letting me know you have moved your page, let
me have a look. Oh dear, this no longer looks like the same page, far too
different let me re-evaluate the page rank based on current factors. Sorry
I can only give you a 1/10 for this.

This is typical of the whole proposed site.

The next area your client will need to be aware of is web site conversion.

You really should take expert help on A/B testing to ensure the new design
still converts sales. I have seen a few situations where a new website
causes sales to drop dramatically.

There are tools and techniques to roll out your new site in a measured way
to minimise the risk of this fallout.

Sorry if this all sounds like bad news. It just depends on your objectives
for the site.

The good news is you are unlikely to lose the home page PR of 3 while you
have those incoming links and so with careful internal linking you will be
able to transfer the PR around the new pages but it will take time,
anywhere up to a year but more typically 6 months.

Good luck and plan carefully, 

Matthew