Keep the old pages until you know they have been removed from the indexes of all the major engines, and then remove them. Be sure you have a custom 404 error page also in place in case some of these pages have been bookmarked, or otherwise referred to by visitors after they have been removed. The alternative to keeping the entire site is to use software like a URL rewrite to perform the redirect. A URL rewrite intercepts page requests and forwards them to the “proper” page. While many people use re-writers to turn dynamic sites into static sites, they are also useful for these types of redirects.

Be sure to use services like the Google XML sitemap submission, or Yahoo's bulk submit feature to resubmit your “new” site. While you can wait for the crawler to find all the new pages, it's probably better to give them a little push in the right direction. You should also know that if you are planning on adding a bunch of new content to existing sections of the site that new content will impact rankings. This is because the engines have to evaluate the new content to see what impact it has on the rest of the site in terms of link inheritance and overall contribution to the theme of the site or section. This will delay your site's re-indexing. Auto Parts SEO Consultant India, Real Estate SEO Consultant India, Hotel SEO Services India, Artist web design India.

Finally, prepare to pay for listings. Set aside some budget for a PPC campaign. It would be best if you could afford to pay for your high traffic general phrases, because these are likely the phrases that will take the longest to recover from a major site change. You should not have to bid on branded phrases (such as your company name) because these rankings will likely return the quickest. If, however, you have competitors or affiliates bidding on those terms you may also need to bid on them to keep your traffic up. You should already have an agreement in place which forces your affiliates to bid lower than you on these terms, so you should be able to keep your costs down on them.

You should have the budget to cover two to three months traffic. This is likely an extended duration as most sites are re-indexed fairly quickly but it is better to be prepared for it, in case something happens. Your PPC campaign should also cover the major PPC engines – at this time they are Yahoo! and Google. You could also branch out to other smaller engines such as Ask Jeeves and Looksmart as they can sometimes send highly qualified traffic at a fraction of the cost of the larger providers.

As a side note, when you set up your PPC campaign, do not use broad matching. Try and keep your campaign as specific as possible – this will help you keep your costs down because you will only be paying for those clicks, and they will likely be more qualified clicks. If you follow these simple tips: planning for and minimizing changes as much as possible and preparing for the worst by planning a PPC campaign to offset your losses, then you should be able to maintain your traffic and recover your previous positions within a short period of time.

However, if you are doing a site wide reconstruction – that is new pages, new names, new folder structure. Be sure to keep the old site. Before you make any changes, you will want to check what rankings already exist and 301 those pages to the “new” pages. I say keep the old site because you can do this check and redirect on a page by page basis. If your pages are dynamic (PHP or ASP) you can insert redirect code on the pages. If the pages are static HTML you can use meta refresh code to redirect to the proper page.