Making unresponsive site responsive, should I expect any ranking penalties?
-
Hello,
I have a website made with asp.net and ranking quite well for a number of competitive keywords like in google top 10 results for more than a dozen competitive keywords.
Recently in order for better user experience, I am having it developed so it is fully responsive for all screen resolutions. Basically all the design element / site text will remain the same including color scheme / layout etc outwardly but internally this will change everything all the css / page html (tables converted to divs) etc.
Now my question is:
1. Will this considered by bots a complete site overhaul and ranking will take a hit even if I stay with current platform i.e. asp.net?
2. While making design responsive I can also develop a wordpress theme, which will make it easier to work with the website as the site does not require any programming. So if I also change the platform like from MS IIS/asp to Apache / php how will search engine bots take this?
3. If above in fact will result in ranking drop, how much time will it take for the rankings to get back to normal?
Note that I use extensionless urls so the urls will remain the same as well even if we convert from asp to php.
Sorry for long details but question is bugging me from weeks.
-
I'd recommend you run some A/B tests. In our experience with site revamps, it's best to ensure your visitors are happy first, whcih you can measure using conversion rates.
If you notice a big dip in conversions, something may be broken which could then have a knock-on effect with your rankings.
From a massive revamp we recently did to make things responsive (1.5M pges) we noticed an increase in most of our rankings.
But just remember - treat google as a mobile user, so if you start simple and progressively add more content via ajax as the screen size increases, remember google may not pick these up, it will see your 'simplest' page, so make sure you don't remove any important on-page factors.
-
Hi,
I did several major site migrations in recent months and if you get the basics right, there should be no (negative) impact on your rankings. It's a myth that site migrations always lead to a drop in rankings. Changing technology should not have an impact - Google is all about the user experience, not about the technology used to create the user experience. Having a responsive site should increase your traffic (and rankings).
Not affiliated to them - but as already indicated by Travis a tool like Screaming Frog (the paid version) is almost a pre-requisite for a successful migration.
The main thing you should take care of is that all your current url's are properly redirected to avoid 404's after migration. You indicate that the url's are not going to change so this should be no problem. To be sure - crawl your current website with a tool (like ScreamingFrog) to get the full list of url's. Export the list of url's & replace the current domain with your test domain and crawl the responsive version based on this list. Check if all url's return a 200 status (if they return a 301 - check if the redirected url's return a 200 status). As a side effect, crawling your current site could also show you other areas of improvement like images that are too heavy, endless loops, unbalanced site structure, etc. If you encounter issues with your current site - try to solve them with the migration.
Compare the main on-page items between the two sites (H1, page title, metadescription) - in your case they should be identical (if you use ScreamingFrog this is a pretty basic task - just export the craw results to xls & see if they match)
Crawl your new site - check if the number of pages crawled is identical (or close) to the number of pages crawled on the current site. Screamingfrog allows you to see the site structure - compare it with your current site, to be sure that important content is not pushed deeper into your site.
Use a tool like webpagetest.org to check the speed of your site - both for your current site and your new site to be sure that with the new designs you are not slowing down your site - do this for a number of typical pages on your site (hint: look at your most popular landing pages in Analytics). Do the same checks with https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - see if you improve the results with your new responsive site. Your score for mobile should be a lot better - if not - you did something wrong with your re-design.
For your most important pages (probably your most important landing pages / most visited pages) - do some visual checks between old & new site - is all the content present, does it look ok, ...etc.
I don't know if you get a lot of traffic from image search (check your webmastertools). If this is the case: if the url's and/or the names of the images change - make sure that the 'old' images remain accessible under the old url (in my experience it takes a bit longer for google to update the index for Image search).
Make sure that your sitemap is updated when migrating. Probably you block your test site for indexing - don't forget to remove this when putting your new site online.
After migration, check your webmastertools for 404's - idem for Google Analytics. Correct 404's as fast as possible (make sure that your 404 page is tagged in Analytics).
To answer your point 3 - if something goes wrong during migration, in my experience you should count on approx. 3 months for recovery, but with no guarantee that you'll return to previous positions, so better make sure that you get the points above right from the start.
Good luck with the migration!
-
Why not just adopt WordPress? ; ) I generally don't work with the .Net platform in the wild, unless I'm prospecting. You may or may not believe some of the crazy things that platform does out of the box. So make sure to get a full crawl of the site and sort out any issues prior to dev work. I recommend Screaming Frog in most instances. But if you have a gigantic site and/or you may not be able to identify problems readily, you may find Deep Crawl worth the price.
At any rate, just make sure you have a pre and post launch crawl for comparison. That alone can save you hours of time, should something go a awry. If nothing else the crawls will help a consultant, should you need one in the future.
Since you're making major site changes, it's also a good idea to get some site speed benchmarks. (Get benchmarks under various traffic loads, if possible.) It's possible that you can end up with a slower site, even though it's responsive. There are a number of ways that can happen, but at least you'll know if you have a speed problem.
I recommend GTmetrix and Pingdom for the above tasks. Here are some really simple fixes from Feed The Bot that should help with speed, once you're on an Apache server.
Just remember, redesigns are a great time to catch any loose ends you 'didn't have time for' or were 'minor problems'. Those minor problems stack up to considerable wins, once they're righted. You're on the right path with a responsive redesign. Remember to preserve the source order of the site between versions (desktop, mobile, tablet) as much as possible. That will help with the speed as well.
-
Hi-
If the page content is the same is the url structure is the same, I don't suspect you'll see too much, if any, damage. You might even do better because you went responsive. Just be careful to make sure of things like placement of the title tag, etc, and your stylings (H1, etc) are similar to where they were before.
Good Luck
Ken
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
-
Top-10 ranked site dropping in/out of Google index?
I work for a company that makes an important product in a category. The company has a website (www.company.org); the product is at www.company.org/product. We recently (early May) redesigned and rearchitected the product site for SEO purposes. The company site talks about the category a bit (imagine the Colgate site; it talks about "toothpaste" a bit). The blog (blog.company.org/product) also talks about the category quite a bit (and links to the company site of course). The product is a major product in the category, among the top 3. The site and blog have been around for 15+ years. The site has appx. a billion backlinks, most branded links to the product. It's in the top 50 highest ranked sites among all sites on the internet in the ahrefs rank index. Imagine you are searching for our product category, "category". If you search for "category" in Bing today, my company's site is the 3rd result, and it's the 1st result from a company that makes a product in this category. If you search for "category" in Google today, our site is not in the top 150 results. In fact, the site keeps dropping out of Google's index. (See attached for what that looks like in the search console.) What might cause a site to jump from "ranked in top 10" to "not ranked" in Google -- back and forth every couple of days? Penalties? Our recent (early May) site rearchitecture? We're not making giant, index-shifting changes every day. wE0Bn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | hoosteeno0 -
How to rank an ecommerce site for search terms starting with how where why
Hi guys, I just got a new SEO job for an e commerce store, the client is asking to rank the site for keywords like where to buy used phone, where to sell my used phone for for best rates and so, the question is how can i achieve that, can anyone help me with some concrete suggestion? Thanks in Advance,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mkhurramali0 -
New site failing to rank - could this be why?
I have a new client site that is not appearing anywhere in the top 100 for its main keywords. ASSUMING that this is not an issue with optimization or link quality, I am wondering whether it might be the following... The client's company has a parent company whose website has decent authority. This website links to the new (client) website. In addition, the 2 press releases we have done include links to both companies, since one was an outgrowth of the other. This is all 100% natural, so my inclination is that this is not causing the issue. But does anyone have any experience to suggest otherwise? That having website A linking to website B, and 50+ press release websites linking to both, could be causing the algorithm to throttle website Bs ability to rank? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zakkyg0 -
Site: inurl: Search
I have a site that allows for multiple filter options and some of these URL's have these have been indexed. I am in the process of adding the noindex, nofollow meta tag to these pages but I want to have an idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed so I can monitor when these have been re crawled and dropped. The structure for these URL's is: http://www.example.co.uk/category/women/shopby/brand1--brand2.html The unique identifier for the multiple filtered URL's is --, however I've tried using site:example.co.uk inurl:-- but this doesn't seem to work. I have also tried using regex but still no success. I was wondering if there is a way around this so I can get a rough idea of how many of these URL's have been indexed? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrappleAgency0 -
Why is my client's site not ranking anymore? Like big time!
Ok, I'm reaching out to all of you Moz'rs for some help with this one. My client's site has dropped off the face of google in a real short period of time. It went from page 1 (avg rank 3 to page 6 (avg rank 50) and below in the matter of 2 weeks. Here's some facts: 1. DA is a 22 and homepage PA is a 31. It outranks all other sites in its competitive set. 2. The homepage used to be the page that displays for keyword searches, now its the FAQ page, which has a lower PA of 23. Why has the home page seemingly vaporized? And, why is the FAQ showing as the first result? What should I start checking. I feel paralyzed, not sure where to start. More info: a. There are no alerts present in Webmaster Tools. b. For some reason the homepage (domain.com) was 301'd to domain.com/home.html. Domain.com is indexed by Google, however, domain.com/home.html is not. If this is the issue, what is the best way to handle it? Thanks in advance for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rhoadesjohn1 -
REPOST: How much does "overall site semantic theme" influence rankings?
Hello everyone on the new cool Moz! I've optimized sites before that are dedicated to 1, 2 or 3 products and or services. These sites inherently talk about one main thing - so the semantics of the content across the whole site reflect this. I get these ranked well on a local level. Now, take an e-commerce site - which I am working on - 2000 products, all of which are quite varied - cookware, diningware, art, decor, outdoor, appliances... there is a lot of different semantics throughout the site's different pages. Does this influence the ranking possibilities? Your opinion and time is appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
How to make an AJAX site crawlable when PushState and #! can't be used?
Dear Mozzers, Does anyone know a solution to make an AJAX site crawlable if: 1. You can't make use of #! (with HTML snapshots) due to tracking in Analytics 2. PushState can't be implemented Could it be a solution to create two versions of each page (one without #!, so campaigns can be tracked in Analytics & one with #! which will be presented to Google)? Or is there another magical solution that works as well? Any input or advice is highly appreciated! Kind regards, Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ConversionMob0 -
Can a home page penalty cause a drop in rankings for all pages?
All my main keywords have dropped out of the SERPS. Could it be that the home page (the strongest) page has been devalued and therefore 'link juice' that used to spread throughout the site is no longer doing so. Would this cause all other pages to drop? I just can't understand how all my pages have lost rankings. The site is still indexed so there's no problem there.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0