halloween seo

I have a problem.

I want to rebuild my Halloween site, but I think I’ve left it too late for this year.

It’s currently just a hand-built site, which means it’s lightweight, runs quickly, and is really well optimised for SEO.

So good that its currently on page 1 at Google for halloween australia, halloween events, halloween costumes australia, and more.

It’s even translating into sales – I have links to affiliate companies on the site, and have referred a dozen sales for costumes and party goods in the last two weeks. So I really don’t want to mess things up.

But I wanted to make it more of a community.  Its pretty basic – you can’t upload PDFs of fliers, or have fancy fonts to advertise the halloween event. It needs more easy interaction.

Currently I have to manually approve all halloween events, to avoid spam. But if I make it better, people will be able to see straight away what their event looks like, and customise it on the spot.

I have a new Drupal version of the site ready on my laptop. I just have to upload it, and re-enter all the halloween events that people have already added. And there are more growing, every day.

If I do 301 permanent redirects, so that people clicking on old indexed pages are automatically redirected to the new pages, that would fix things in the short term. But every seo forum I read, the experts admit that redirect are eventually followed by a drop in listings. It’s never smooth.

Do I want to risk my good rankings this close to halloween? Or do I upgrade the site to make it easier to use.

A conundrum.