Changing site and scared of losing existing SEO benefits

[Oceanwaver]

Company has a site that is old and developed in PHP and not overly search engine friendly - having said all that over 60 of the pages index really well in the search engines.

Our MD is obsessed with developing a new site and has brought in a new design agency to do the work - they are currently blasting away with the new site. I'm really worried that we are going to lose all the existing SEO benefits of our current site - what is the best way of keeping these?

Any advise would be greatly appreciated

 

[mneylon]

Map the old URLs to the new ones.

If the site is on Linux you can do it using Apache's mod_rewrite

If it's on Windows there's an ISAPI rewrite module for IIS that will do something similar

Basically you'd want to use a 301 redirect from the old url to the new one

 

[Oceanwaver]

Thanks BK - Would Google be happy with that?

So in effect we would map all the old pages that are in php to their new pages. Would you have to do this on a page by page basis or does your solution apply to all pages...

Thanks again

 

[Oceanwaver]

Also excuse my ignorance but would that mean we would need to continue hosting the old php site ?

 

[mneylon]

Thanks BK - Would Google be happy with that?

Yes

So in effect we would map all the old pages that are in php to their new pages. Would you have to do this on a page by page basis or does your solution apply to all pages...

Thanks again

that depends on how the new site's file structure is.

It might be simply the case of using a regular expression to do it or you might need to do each page by itself

 

[mneylon]

Also excuse my ignorance but would that mean we would need to continue hosting the old php site ?

No.