: Revamped Joomla site to Google search engine 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

@Kristi941

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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