I'm in the process of of converting a HTML site to RavenNuke, which is (touchwood) going well so far, but in the back of mind I am thinking about how I can minimise the impact of this transfer on it's search engine ranking.

The website has a number of articles about various topics and these have been added to the RN site. So I am thinking of creating a 301 redirect to the articles new page in RN. In fact most pages will have a respective page in RN, so I could do the same for all pages. Is this something that will help?

Obviously I can install NukeSEO etc, but is there anything else I can do to smooth out the transfer to the new site?

BTW the domain name is remaining the same.

Thanks in advance

jakec

Yes a 301 is the way to go IMHO as this will tell the search engines it is a permanent redirect.
I would also add each old url to the robots.txt file under a deny directive to stop crawling of possible cached pages from other search engines.

I concur with Guardian, but just understand that you may still incur ranking issues for awhile (from my past reading), but the 301 should make the process go much smoother.

I would also recommend, if you have not already, paying ahead 5 to 10 years on your new domain (I am assuming it is a new domain). Gives a bit more "credibility" to the search engines...

Thanks guys, it's good to know that I am on the right track.

It will be the same domain name and there is no plan to change it at this moment.

Yes, registering domain names in advance is certainly worthwhile from my reading and this is something I need to do myself for some of my key sites - just have to mint some new coinage lol.

What domain names are you thinking of G?

If you are entering a competitive market it certainly does pay to have a domain that has been registered for a while.