Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
URL mapping for site migration
-
Hi all! I'm currently working on a migration for a large e-commerce site. The old one has around 2.5k urls, the new one 7.5k. I now need to sort out the redirects from one to the other.
This is proving pretty tricky, as the URL structure has changed site wide. There doesn't seem to be any consistent rules either so using regex doesn't really work.
By and large, the copy appears to be the same though. Does anybody know of a tool I can crawl the sites with that will export the crawled url and related copy into a spreadsheet? That way I can crawl both sites and compare the copy to match them up.
Thanks!
-
Just to confirm mosquitohawk's comments, there's not a great way to do this other than sorting through the spreadsheet.
Hopefully URLs have distinct enough subfolders that you can break them out into sections easily.
-
Darn!
Another alternative would be to use Screaming Frog to get a full list of URLs from each site, then use a scraping tool like Mozenda to scrape that list from each site, pull the content area and it will create the data structure you want and make it available for export. Then you can basically do what I had said in the previous email, compare the two spreadsheets.
-
Thank you for taking the time to answer. I did think of Screaming Frog, but the problem is that it only records the instances of custom parameters, not the contents. I tweeted the SF team to check and they said it wasn't possible too. I've also tried InSite Inspyder too but tat doesn't do it either.
-
Screaming Frog SEO Spider could do that for you. You'd need to set up a custom filter to look for a copy identifier (ie: a div that always contains the main copy) and have it scrape that for you while it's crawling. Do the same for the other site and then you could match them up pretty easy I think.
Here is a good resource on different ways of using the tool - http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide We use it almost daily for a variety of tasks and find it to be pretty flexible. Good luck!
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate URLs ending with #!
Hi guys, Does anyone know why a site can contain duplicate URLs ending with hastag & exclamation mark e.g. https://site.com.au/#! We are finding a lot of these URLs (as duplicates) and i was wondering what they are from developer standpoint? And do you think it's worth the time and effort adding a rel canonical tag or 301 to these URLs eventhough they're not getting indexed by Google? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright0 -
Moving to a new site while keeping old site live
For reasons I won't get into here, I need to move most of my site to a new domain (DOMAIN B) while keeping every single current detail on the old domain (DOMAIN A) as it is. Meaning, there will be 2 live websites that have mostly the same content, but I want the content to appear to search engines as though it now belongs to DOMAIN B. Weird situation. I know. I've run around in circles trying to figure out the best course of action. What do you think is the best way of going about this? Do I simply point DOMAIN A's canonical tags to the copied content on DOMAIN B and call it good? Should I ask sites that link to DOMAIN A to change their links to DOMAIN B, or start fresh and cut my losses? Should I still file a change of address with GWT, even though I'm not going to 301 redirect anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kdaniels0 -
SEO site Review
Does anyone have suggestions on places that provide in depth site / analytics reviews for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gordian0 -
Splitting a Site into Two Sites for SEO Purposes
I have a client that owns a business that really could be easily divided into two separate business in terms of SEO. Right now his web site covers both divisions of his business. He gets about 5500 visitors a month. The majority go to one part of his business and around 600 each month go to the other. So about 11% I'm considering breaking off this 11% and putting it on an entirely different domain name. I think I could rank better for this 11%. The site would only be SEO'd for this particular division of the company. The keywords would not be in competition with each other. I would of course link the two web sites and watch that I don't run into any duplicate content issues. I worry about placing the redirects from the pages that I remove to the new pages. I know Google is not a fan of redirects. Then I also worry about the eventual drop in traffic to the main site now. How big of a factor is traffic in rankings? Other challenges include that the business services 4 major metropolitan areas. Would you do this? Have you done this? How did it work? Any suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MSWD0 -
Exact keyword URL or not?
Hi all, I have a quick question about the proper use of permalinks. Let's say that I have a website about sports and I want to create an internal page dedicated to shoes. I know that the keyword "shoe" has 15.000 monthly visits, while the keyword "shoes" has 1.000 monthly visits. How do I have to name the internal page? http://www.example.com/shoe or http://www.example.com/shoes (with a final 's')? I would think that by naming the URL http://www.example.com/shoes, the search engine would consider that page for the keywords "shoe" and "shoes", but I am not sure about it. Should I create a URL that only focuses on one specific keyword ("shoe", in this example) or a URL that may encompass more than one keyword ("shoe" and "shoes")? I hope this is clear. Thank you for your time and help. All best, Sal
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | salvyy0 -
Optimize a Classifieds Site
Hi, I have a classifieds website and would like to optimize it. The issues/questions I have: A Classifieds site has, say, 500 cities. Is it better to create separate subdomains for each city (http://city_name.site.com) or subdirectory (http://site.com/city_name)? Now in each city, there will be say 50 categories. Now these 50 categories are common across all the cities. Hence, the layout and content will be the same with difference of latest ads from each city and name of the city and the urls pointing to each category in the relevant city. The site architecture of a classifieds site is highly prone to have major content which is not really a duplicate content. What is the best way to deal with this situation? I have been hit by Panda in April 2011 with traffic going down 50%. However, the traffic since then has been around same level. How to best handle the duplicate content penalty in case with site like a classifieds site. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ketan90 -
Is it safe to redirect multiple URLs to a single URL?
Hi, I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates. The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date. The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links. Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain. My intention is to: Shut down the old site Focus all attention on building up content on the new website Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...) Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage Sounds good, right? But there is one issue I need some advice on... The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site. I call these my "black sheep pages". So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death? OPTION A: oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndreVanKets
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION B: oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com OPTION 😄 oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique. What would you do? Help 😐1 -
Badges For a B2b site
love this seo tactic but it seems hard to get people to adopt it Has anyone seen a successful badge campaign for a b2b site? please provide examples if you can.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DavidKonigsberg0
