changing your CMS

[Cloughie]

ok, you guys persuaded me not to change my domain name.

I am still going to press ahead with a site redesign and CMS, its badly needed.

I have a question. Won´t it be bad to have my articles running on a new cms?

I mean what if people have backlinked to my articles under the old url´s?

Same goes for category url´s and any other pages that are linked to.

Whats the best way to manage this?

Thakns in advance

Dainel

[chromate]

It's best not to change your urls for the reasons you mentioned. Also, there's a small chance you could trigger a duplicate content filter because Google will think you have the same content on different URLs.

Can't the new CMS be made to use the same URL format that you have now? A good programmer shouldn't have any problem with that.

[Chris]

Yes, avoid changing your URLs when at all possible. That gives you the same problems switching domains gives you, only not for your homepage.


You currently use article.php?articleid=255 so that shouldn't be hard to replicate.

[Cloughie]

yep, I could easily get someone to program the new cms with the same links.

I was just thinking that ,my new url´s would be much more like the ones on WSP.net, i.e real words, but if the problem of triggering off alarms at google and losing backlinks outweighs that, I´ll keep the same url´s.

[Chris]

well you can do it two ways, keep the old URLs for older articles but use new URLs for new articles.

[shadowbox]

Another way is to leave the old 'article.php' page on your server and replace it with a script that does a 301 redirect to the new page. So, let's say your new CMS uses a script called 'page.php', and assuming all article IDs remain the same, your replacement article.php script would say something like:




$id = makeInteger($_GET['articleID']); //get the article ID and for safety turn it into an integer

header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
header( "Location: page.php?id=".$id);
exit;


This works well if you keep the article ID's the same - otherwise you'd need a look up table or file and compare old to new. I also assume this could all be done in .htaccess as well.