I’ve re-launched quite a few existing sites on a WordPress platform. For the most part, I’ve not bothered too much about any initial drop in page rank. I’ve not carried out a lot of redirects. In my experience, the ranking picks up again pretty quickly and usually improves (presumably because the non-technical authors now find page creation a lot easier).
YMMV.
It is good practice to 301 redirect all old URLs to the new ones, because the new URL format will most likely be different. Redirecting the old URLs is your best chance of maintaining your current rankings.
Yeah, but if you make a Google Webmaster account and resubmit your site for crawling, it fixes it pretty fast.
Depends on how big your changes are, and if you really want to have to resort the 301s. I ended up redirected site.com/articles/(.*) to site.com/news/articles as a flat redirect, instead of per article, because at 1000 articles with no set naming pattern, I was going nutsy 😉
if you make a Google Webmaster account and resubmit your site for crawling, it fixes it pretty fast.
I always submit a sitemap manually as soon as the site is launched.
See … I don’t since if the pages are all linked, I know Google’ll grab it. Also since you can submit a feed as sitemap, it tends to get things started nicely 😉
