Its something you may not have thought of – what impact is changing your Content Management System going to have on your referrals from google?
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The answer is – cataclysmic! Huge! Disastrous!? This is of course my own experience.? I changed from Blogger to WordPress on January 6th 2006.? Since then my referrals from Google for a whole range of keywords has plummeted.? On Thursday the 19th January for example I received 0 referrals from google.? That’s right, its not a typo, zero referrals from google.? This could of course kill a lesser site!? Fortunately I am still receiving a whole host of referrals from a number of other sites (thanks Open Source CMS) and from people bookmarking the site.
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Why does changing the Content Management System make a difference?? The content is the same!
The content may be the same, but google doesn’t know this yet.? All your urls (the address of the pages) will have changed.? Google needs to go through and re-index all your pages, which can take some time.? You may also get penalized – Google may think that you are trying to fool the search engines by quickly adding or changing huge parts of your site to make it look like your site has more content.
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How to avoid destroying your page rank by changing content management systems
Do it gradually – one section at a time, never moving more than 10% of your site at a time. And keep your old CMS running in the position it was previously, but ensure that you link every page of the old system to relevant pages in your new.? Hopefully, this will help you avoid the problems that I have had.?
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Please comment if you have any other suggestions on how to avoid losing page rank and referrals from search engines when changing content management systems.
Hi,
Very interesting article. I have a question though: please tell me I’m right
If I use mod_rewrite to get all the urls to be the same on the new cms as on the old one, it will be seamless, right?
I’ll soon start a new website as well as doing some for clients, so this all is good information.
Cheers
If you use mod_rewrite to keep the content at the same urls then you should be fine. I say should be rather than definately as there is a small chance that if the new html that you use is very different from the old google may penalise you because the whole site has changed to rapidly. Going from one CSS layout to another CSS layout (as opposed to tables) obviously would minimise the risk (as google can more easily disginuish the layouot code from the content then)
[…] In my Dangers of changing Content Management Systems article I wrote that changing CMS (Content Management System) could cause your page rank (which influences how high you appear in Search Engine Results Pages) to plummet.? Thankfully, there is a way you can minimize the risk, you can use Apache’s mod_rewrite so that all your urls don’t change at once. – thanks to Patricia for pointing that out.? Patricia – where were you before I changed CMS?? Little did I know how badly changing CMS effects your Page Rank – Google still has me listed, but poorly, but MSN and Yahoo have dropped phuba.com from their lists entirely!! ? […]