Best Way To Reorganise And Simplify A Website

martindow

I have a longstanding site with two parts - an online shop and an earlier part of the site containing information about the products.  Years ago the shop software was basic and did not do well in google.  The information pages already were listed and tended to come up in searches.

The shop software is now much more sophisticated and google-friendly.  I am thinking about putting the information from the older part of the site into the shop and abandoning the information pages.  This would make the site much more straightforward to deal with and simpler for customers.  At the moment it is clearly two separate sites with links between and I think I am losing customers who can't find their way around or give up trying.  I also suspect that google is downgrading me in the listings as there are in effect two pages for the same item (one in the shop and the other in the information side) although the wording is different on each.

How should I go about this?  I was thinking of putting everything into shop pages and then doing 301 redirects from the superseded pages to the relevant shop pages.  I've seen code to put in the .htaccess file to do this. If so do I need to keep the old page in place, delete it entirely or would it be best to keep it, possibly an almost empty page, on the server? I would appreciate any advice - you can probably tell that I am out of my depth here!

booneruk

martindow said:

I was thinking of putting everything into shop pages and then doing 301 redirects from the superseded pages to the relevant shop pages.  I've seen code to put in the .htaccess file to do this. If so do I need to keep the old page in place, delete it entirely or would it be best to keep it, possibly an almost empty page, on the server? I would appreciate any advice - you can probably tell that I am out of my depth here!

This is the correct approach. Also, old pages generally don't need to be kept if you've configured 301 redirects to override them (provided that the existence of the page isn't required for the 301 to be activated - this will depend on the how the site is configured)

Pick a simple page in the old part of the site, create a 301 redirect for it and then delete the page. Does the 301 still work? if so, you're good to go. If it stops working, you can recreate the old page again.

Vitor

301s are the best option. Review your internal linking structure to ensure that links point to active pages only. Update (or create) a sitemap.xml and submit that to the main search engine crawlers so they re-index your site.

martindow

Thanks both.  I've managed to completely mess up my site and am not sure how to sort it out now.  I did a few pages and set up redirects successfully. But then tried to redirect the home page from /index.htm to /acatalog/index.html which is the home page for the shop.  I suspect that this is not possible as index has to follow the domain name without a directory between.  This didn't work - it shows a strangely rendered page where the layout is not right and a lot of links don't work.   I deleted that 301 redirect from .htaccess, but it seems to have taken effect and I'm not sure how to remedy this.  

I hoped that it was just cached on my computer, but trying on other people's computers the same thing is happening everywhere.  I can go to individual pages on the site and in the shop if I type in the full address, but typing in just the site address brings up  the corrupted page.

Any ideas of how to resolve this?

Vitor

It should be possible to set the configuration in .htaccess so that default page served for the domain is in acatalog, There's no need for a leading '/', that would imply an absolute path from the filesystem root, which isn't how the DirectoryIndex works.

DirectoryIndex acatatalog/index.html

Worth checking that references to CSS, Javascipt etc. are resolving. If you have them as relative references it can be helpful to use the base  tag to ensure all references are set from the root URL.