Website redesign - how do I avoid screwing up my site SEO?
-
We are preparing to launch a newly designed (and much improved) website in the next few months. I want to be very careful to ensure we do not mess up any rankings (and hopefully actually improve rankings) when switching over the site.
I'm particularly concerned about one key phrase that our homepage currently ranks on. After the redesign it would be more appropriate for our of our subpages to rank for that term, but I'd rather have our homepage rank (less relevant for this keyword than the subpage) then nothing at all.
I know about 301 redirects, and we are planning on creating a few comprehensive diagrams to ensure we redirect old pages to the correct new pages. Beyond that, what can I do to preserve our rankings?
Thanks!
-Ryan
-
What works for my clients when I help them transition is to do all that's been suggested so far (even considering splitting out the work into phases if at all possible). But also, it's doing a press release right away, getting social buzz about the new site, and working on adding / building up the content around the core phrases, then link to that new content from the home page.
Then focus on link building efforts to reinforce the new URLs. And see if you can get any existing link sources to change the URLs in those to the new version links - sending much stronger signals than just 301 redirected links.
If you do the work properly, you should eventually have both the home page and the inner pages show up for your most important phrases.
-
EGOL is hinting at something I"ll say more explicitly; why don't you split your site design into two phases?
- Phase 1: Optimize / Update the UI of your site. Keep the markup that's relevant to your SEO efforts the same or improve it.
- Phase 2: Change the URLs of the pages on your site.
Once the dust settles from Phase 1 and you've seen how Google has responded to you updates, consider whether or not you really want to do Phase 2.
All that said, I have implemented both Phase 1 and Phase 2 at the same time before. I was careful to add lots of 301 redirect rules to my .htaccess files using mod_rewrite. I did not experience any kind of rankings penalty from Google.
-
Great to hear that you are improving your design. Its a great time to improve your SEO too!
You want to be sure that you preserve all of your on-page optimization elements such as <title> <h> and other markup. You also want to preserve internal linkage, anchor text and image optimization.</p> <p>Navigation structure can be a place where you might be able to make some linkjuice and usability gains by placing links to important pages in your persistent navigation, incorporating navigation hierarchy such as breadcrumbs, and incorporating relevant links in your paragraph text if you don't have these features at present.</p> <p>For such an important project it might be worthwhile to hire a person who really understands how linkjuice and flows through a site to help you</p> <p>Finally you mention 301 redirects on old pages to new pages. This sounds like you are going to change a lot of URLs. Is that necessary? Preserving the old URLs can be more efficient.</p></title>
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
-
My client redesigned their site. Once it went live, ALL of their rankings disappeared. Even branding. Help?
Does anybody know why this might happen? When we made the new site, we just changed the skins. The source code was the same, the content was the same. Even when I search their brand name and their city, their URL won't show up. When I search their URL into Google, it won't even pull up their homepage: it only pulls up /contact-us and some other subpages. Any tips on what I should be looking out for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaylorRHawkins1 -
Site under attack from Android SEO bots - expert help needed
For last 25 days, we are facing a weird attack on our site. We are getting 10x the normal mobile traffic - all from Android, searching for our name specifically. We are sure that this is not authentic traffic as the traffic is coming from Organic searches and bouncing off. Initially, we thought this was a DDoS attack, but that does not seem to be the case. It looks like someone is trying to damage our Google reputation by performing too many searches and bouncing off. Has any one else faced a similar issue before? What can be done to mitigate the impact on site. (FYI - we get ~2M visits month on month, 80% from Google organic searches). Any help would be highly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KJ_AV0 -
Old Website Build Effecting SEO
So this is a bit of a strange one. My latest website was built on a different domain, then transferred over (as opposed to being built on a subdomain). I was told that the domain which my site was built on wasn't indexed by Google, but looking at the Google Search Console I can see that the old domain name is showing up as the most linked to domain name of my current site - meaning it was indexed. The domain (and all of its pages) does have a 301 redirect to the new website home page (as opposed to their individual pages), but could this be causing me a problem with SEO? Additionally, my website has a sister (UK and US websites), both link to each other on the footer (which appears on every page). Could this be pulling my SEO efforts down if it is a do-follow link?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
How to answer for question "why xyz site is ranking for abc keyword" and not our website
Hi All, This is a layman question but would like to get a concrete answer for. I would like to know how to answer the questions like "Why our competitor is ranking for keyword ABC but not us"? What metrics or data can I showcase that gives logical answer. Please help in this regard. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Avin1230 -
My site shows 503 error to Google bot, but can see the site fine. Not indexing in Google. Help
Hi, This site is not indexed on Google at all. http://www.thethreehorseshoespub.co.uk Looking into it, it seems to be giving a 503 error to the google bot. I can see the site I have checked source code Checked robots Did have a sitemap param. but removed it for testing GWMT is showing 'unreachable' if I submit a site map or fetch Any ideas on how to remove this error? Many thanks in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SolveWebMedia0 -
SEO Concerns From Moving Mobile M Dot site to Responsive Version?
I currently have my mobile site set up as a m dot site. I have designed a new responsive/adaptive version of my desktop site I would like to start using. When I search from google on mobile, my website is indexed as the m dot site. When I make the switch, this will no longer be the case as I will only have one url for both mobile and desktop. The m dot url's will no longer work. Are there any SEO consequences from making this shift?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mikeylong70 -
New site causes massive drop off in ranking, old site restored how long to recover?
Hello, We launched and updated version of our site, mainly design changes and some functionality. 3 days after the launch we vanished from the rankings, previous page one results were now out of the top 100. We have identified some of the issues with the new site and chose to restore the old well ranking site. My question is how long might it take for the ranking to come back, if at all? The drop happened on the third day and the site was restored on the third day. We are now on day 6. Using GWT with have used fetch as Google and resubmitted the site map. Any help would be gladly received. Thanks James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JamesBryant0 -
Entire site code copied - potential SEO issues?
Hi folks, We have noticed that our site has been directly duplicated by another site. They have copied the entire code, including the JS, CSS and most of the HTML and have simply switched their own text and images onto the template. (We discovered it because they even copied over our analytics tracking and were appearing in our reports - duh!) Does anyone know if there are potential SEO issues in copying the code like that, or do duplicate content issues only apply to indexable HTML content? Thanks! Matthew (I didn't want to out them by sharing their URL because it could have been an external contractor that built the site and they probably had no idea.)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBarker0