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I am about to upload a revamped site of Joomla (update from 1.5 to 2.5 + changes). I currently have a test bed subdomain that I am currently working on. In few days I am about to do the swap and replace the old site with the new one.

I am worrying about Search Engines and specifically Google. The site currently has a very good rank (appears 2nd in the search), what actions do I have to take in order to be updated and preserve the rank? (except submitting the new sitemap I guess).

It's not a difficult task but because I don't have the option to be wrong or mistakes to be done I an asking for a more "expert" advice.

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  • The domain is the same? But the URLs are changing?
    – MrWhite
    Jun 6, 2014 at 11:01
  • Yes but some of them. Mostly the menu has new links and old ones has been completely renamed.
    – user3127632
    Jun 6, 2014 at 11:37
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    You'll have to do permanent redirects to the new urls from the ones that are being replaced with.
    – Abu Nooh
    Jun 6, 2014 at 11:44
  • alright, what about the links that are removed? or autogenerated ? (like products in virtuemart) they may be diffucult to spot changes . (eg virtuemart for v1 to v2 has different search url/parameters since the upgrade)
    – user3127632
    Jun 6, 2014 at 17:47
  • As far as I'm aware the URLs that are not existing anymore you'll have to login to webmaster tools and remove them from the google index. Not sure what you mean by autogenerated, perhaps it has canonical urls?
    – Abu Nooh
    Jun 6, 2014 at 21:51

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I'd probably run a crawler to collect all the URLs of your 1.5 site (a sitemap generator, or link checker should do this for you).

When the site is live, Joomla 2.5 has a redirect manager (under components) which lists all the URLs which have thrown a 404.

You should use the redirect manager to set up 301s on all the pages you know have changed.

If you want to be thorough, you could also run a crawler on the links collected from the 1.5 version. Any now-broken links will then appear in the redirect manager for you to re-point to the correct URL.

Failing that, just keep an eye on the redirect manager and fix any 404s that appear. This isn't as good, as it means at least one user (or robot) would have to get the 404 before it appears. Also, you get a lot of 404s from robots trying to find information about your server, rather than ones by real users.

301s are suspected of losing a small amount of Page Rank, but there is nothing you can do about that beyond asking people who link to your site to update their links.

I'd say the main problem isn't actually loss of rankings, but the time between re-indexing when a user could potentially find you in the SERPs, but then get a broken link when they click on the site.

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