Have I just killed my site?

[Guy]

Well, I have just had to delete ALL my existing product sections and products , then start re-building my site in a different format. Which is soul destroying to be honest. So now all my links listed in google no longer work!! Can anyone advise how long his will take to re-list my site on google please? Have I made a terrible error?
Thanks (very concerened)

Guy.

[jont]

Depends on how quickly you can get them back up and listed again and how much the content varies from the original - if you can rebuild relatively quickly you may still retain all the listings. The tricky part will be keeping all the page names the same!

Why did you have to delete all products and sections and start again? Can you not import from a snap shot or exported file?

[Mike Hughes]

The best thing to do in this circumstance (other than not doing it in the first place) is to create a .htaccess file to do permanent redirects from the old page names to the new ones. That way search engines and customers will find the page they're looking for even if it no longer exists with it's original name.

You'll find plenty of information on how to do this by searching for 'htaccess redirect' on google.

Mike

[wjcampbe]

If you still have an old snapshot, you can recover. First run a new snapshot (remember to give it a unique name) then copy your current site1 to a new location on your hard drive, then import your old snapshot. Run a froogle extract to get a file containing all your old page names. Use this file to build a set of 301 'redirect permanent' instructions for each deleted page pointing to your new index page address, and add this list of redirects to your htaccess file.

Now delete the site1 folder then copy the new site1 back from the new location, if something goes wrong here you can just import the snapshot you did before copying the folder at the start of the exercise.

As you progress with the bulild of the new site, change the redirects to point to individual pages. After a couple of months, it should be OK to start removing the redirects, after ensuring that any links pointing to the old pages have been changed to point at the new, and that G indexes and ranks your new pages.

[Guy]

Thank you for all your advice, I just wish I was more knowledgable about these things.

I had to re-structure my site, so that I could link all the new products to an external database to update my price and stock. I will try and do what you suggest, just worried about my lack of knowledge. Guess I need to do some reading up on re-directs!

[Legends]

Hi Guy

If your site has been well established and googlebot visits you on a regular basis it might not be to long before your new pages are indexed and if you do your homework on SEOing the pages, geting some links into the new pages, you could rank well after just a few days.

Word of caution though, when you make wholesale changes to sites - google can mistake your site for a new site and then you can be "sandboxed" - this means that google will hold back your rankings untill your site matures (can be several months).

Good luck with this

[wjcampbe]

@ Legends
Thus the redirects, to ensure google et al recognise that this is a managed change of content. The additional 'sandbox' period scenario is taken entirely out of the picture by proper redirects.

[Guy]

Ok, thankyou.
I'll let you know how I get on. I'm tempted to just re-load the old snapshot back in. Then try and copy a duplicate of my new "linked" products back into these old sections. Just not quite sure how I do this as my previous attempted at importing a flat file failed, due to descriptions being too long, supposedly.

[Guy]

Well, after fiddling around for a number of hours I resorted to importing my original site snapshot...which after taking most of the night to upload, didn't work....fortunately as it turns out! So I loaded my new site again and checked on google when it had last cached my site, turns out it has already crawled my new site, which seems to be ranking ok, thank goodness.

Thank you all for your advice....what a great community this is. It restores my faith in mankind!

Guy.