But it may inconvenience a lot of people, and make the information inaccessible (from search engines and linking sites) for quite some time. More than 2,000 of the major pages in the old site are now throwing 404s when clicked to from Google/Bing/Yahoo.The site’s pagerank might be affected, or it might not. It just depends on where the highest quality links are coming from and where they are linking. There’s a good chance that many are linking to the homepage, which obviously won’t be affected. But for any sites linking to specific pages of the old site, any pagerank coming from those will be lost with time, not to mention broken links inconvenience people and reflect poorly on all the other sites linking to decaturga.com. In addition, it’s those contextual links pointing to the inner parts of your site that are often very valuable to your site’s reputation. These links take years to build up, and it takes the sites linking to you a long time to correct (also years… if they ever bother to… or if they take the time to figure out what the new link is). So throwing out your old URLs on a large site is discarding a major asset for your site’s reputation.

I don’t care for the retro URLs (i.e., /index.aspx?page=134), and they are somewhat worse than the URL structure of the old site, but that on it’s own probably isn’t going to hurt severely (other than being ugly for publication). That’s not an inherent problem, just a just a missed opportunity, and something to fix on the next redo. But the redirects of the old URLs to the new can still be setup, and it’s something the development company should have done in the first place. It’s never too late to fix this problem. But the sooner they set them up the better. On a site like this, I would probably be more concerned about the actual traffic than the pagerank in the short term (pagerank is fairly ambiguous).

The first thing I would suggest is to setup a proper 404 page (branded like the site) to let people know things have moved around and give them a site map and search engine to find it. Then I would go into the analytics/logs and export all the URLs that get any traffic to a spreadsheet and put in the equivalent link from the new site. Then convert it to a 301 redirect list. It will likely take someone competent a day, but not much longer, to set up all worthwhile redirects. If they can’t do this in the short term for some reason, I hope they at least correct the 404 page.

Steve: we don’t bid on projects. I point out these issues because I think it’s a great site that a lot of people obviously put hard work into, but the developers got sloppy or are new at this (at least that’s how it appears). But I think the issues most likely to affect the audience short-term are relatively easy to fix.

Update: it appears someone is working on the 404 page. I just arrived at a branded 404 from Google, unlike the previous generic one. It appears to be a work in progress. A good sign! Lets see if they finish it. Maybe I just need to be patient.

Kind of like the guys on TV who sell crappy old computers to old folks.