Site redesign. Possible SEO problems?
-
Hi!
Our website has enjoyed good rankings for lots of our keywords for the past 9years.
Over the years the site became heavy, so we want to change the design radically. Content, filenames, titles, urls etc. will all remain identical just the change of a template. The new one is minimalistic and responsive design. We are worrying this may drop our domain or page authority and kill all our past SEO efforts.
**How to do this with the least harm to our rankings? Anything we need to avoid?**Articles/advice/suggestions comments on design and SEO would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you for your help!
Alina
-
Thank you for a reply, Andy!
Now the other question: how much can we change the content not to lose the ranking? Does the change of titles and the content structure influence? What if I leave the keywords but change the content structure?
-
Now the other question: how much can we change the content not to lose the ranking? Does the change of titles and the content structure influence? What if I leave the keywords but change the content structure?
-
Screaming Frog's a great one, a few Google Chrome plug-ins I would use are:
ReDirect Path -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-path/aomidfkchockcldhbkggjokdkkebmdll
Check My Links -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglfIf you use these in combination you will hopefully be able to find any errors in your new design.
-
Fully agree with Andy. The trick with these kinds of design updates is to have a clear testing plan to make certain that, even though you don't think URLs, content, titles etc are being changed, they actually haven't changed. There can be many edge cases where, even though the template change should interact the same way with all content, titles, URL rewrites etc, it just might not. You want to confirm any such cases have been found and fixed before going live with the new design.
Paul
-
She clearly states "Content, filenames, titles, urls etc. will all remain identical just the change of a template." so redirects don't enter into the equation here.
-
301 Re-directs all the way ensuring that all of your old URLs resolve to relevant content. One thing I would advise against is a splash screen and making sure that all of your content is available within 3-4 clicks.
Good Luck
-
Hi Alina,
Changing your site is always a daunting task, but as long as it is for the better, there is no reason why you should lose out.
I have done this a few times now and each time I have been improving the site and then seen a positive jump in traffic and conversions.
All you are doing is changing the template, but when completed, do check the site over with Screaming Frog Spider just to make sure the new template hasn't created any obscure pages or issues that you can't see.
-Andy
-
Hello Alina, recently i changed design of my website (the same you want to do) but i did not change the url's and titles because if i have made that i have lost rankings.
My advice for you is that you change your design but try not take the url's and titles, at least url's. Finally, if you do that, please, 301 re-direction, but you'll lose rankings, sure.
Regards
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
In the middle of a site redesign, looking for some advice at a glance.
Greetings, hope you're doing awesome today! I have a current client in an industry niche, I got them to do a site redesign, based on the many factors needing correction on the current site. I have a good 40 some items still to address, from my frequent manual site audit / proofreading. Reason I am here, is that I'm seeking fresh eyes to address anything I may have missed, of course at a glance, I don't expect a site audit, but do have some concerns about url structure and page titles as you move from category to category. It's a bigcommerce site, so some things that are normal SEO actions aren't as simply implemented. Also, since this is a client, and I'm sure they have competitors using sites like this, I need to keep the url private as well as any specifics, of course for readers in the future, I can or you can mention general issues and solutions. Thank you and please, if interested, will send url at request, can send both the live and dev urls.
Technical SEO | | Deacyde0 -
Duplicate content problem
Hi there, I have a couple of related questions about the crawl report finding duplicate content: We have a number of pages that feature mostly media - just a picture or just a slideshow - with very little text. These pages are rarely viewed and they are identified as duplicate content even though the pages are indeed unique to the user. Does anyone have an opinion about whether or not we'd be better off to just remove them since we do not have the time to add enough text at this point to make them unique to the bots? The other question is we have a redirect for any 404 on our site that follows the pattern immigroup.com/news/* - the redirect merely sends the user back to immigroup.com/news. However, Moz's crawl seems to be reading this as duplicate content as well. I'm not sure why that is, but is there anything we can do about this? These pages do not exist, they just come from someone typing in the wrong url or from someone clicking on a bad link. But we want the traffic - after all the users are landing on a page that has a lot of content. Any help would be great! Thanks very much! George
Technical SEO | | canadageorge0 -
4xx problems
I have noticed that my first main page now is http://www.taxiservicepattaya.com/xampp/. I have not made this and I can not find that page, neither in Dreamwaever or at my web hotel server. How to solve this? How do I find my first, main page?
Technical SEO | | mato0 -
Double problem: mobile friendly site and shopping cart page duplication
I have a website that has two issues related to SEO: 1) the main website (product.com) is not mobile-friendly and 2) I have a shopping cart site (buymyproduct.com) using Magento that basically duplicates our product pages that exist on the main marketing website. Uses click "buy now" on a product page and are sent to the checkout at "buymyproductnow.com". The company cannot overhaul product.com website right away and our shopping site (buymyproduct.com) uses a responsive theme and works well for iphone and iPad so I am thinking of making buymyproduct.com the mobile-friendly version of our website by using a sniffer on product.com and forwarding users to the mobile friendly version. If I add canonical references from the shopping cart product pages and articles back to product.com associated pages, will this lessen the blow to any seo issues? What other factors am I missing/need to consider Complicated and painful. Maybe doing nothing right now is best. Thanks for any feedback.
Technical SEO | | Timmmmy0 -
Site Architecture Trade Off
Hi All I'm looking for some feedback regarding a site architecture issue I'm having with a client. They are about to enter a re-design and as such we're restructuring the site URLs and amending/ adding pages. At the moment they have ranked well off the back of original PPC landing pages that were added onto the site, such as www.company.com/service1, www.company.com/service2, etc The developer, from a developer point of view wished to create a logical site architecture with multiple levels of directories etc. I've suggested this probably isn't the best way to go, especially as the site isn't that large (200-300 pages) and that the key pages we're looking to rank should be as high up the architecture as we can make them, and that this amendment could hurt their current high rankings. It looks like the trade off may be that the client is willing to let some pages be restructured so for example, www.company.com/category/sub-category/service would be www.company.com/service. However, although from a page basis this might be a solution, is there a drawback to having this in place for only a few pages rather than sitewide? I'm just wondering if these pages might stick out like a sore thumb to Google.
Technical SEO | | PerchDigital1 -
Site Relaunch
Hello, I recently launched my new site (Nov. 25, 2011) but still have the old site live because I still need old customer data from the old admin for customer service issues and I cannot delete the old front-end without deleting the old back-end!. I am seeing a lot of referrals coming from the old site IP address with many backlinks to the new site but dont know if this is actually hurting the new site due to duplicate content, ect .. Any input would be greatly aaaaaapreciated 😉 Thanks in advance, Byron-
Technical SEO | | k9byron0