What have your experiences with rankings after a redesign?

[bizarro1000]

Hi,

I am looking to get a site of mine a much needed redesign and was wondering what other peoples experiences have been with rankings in Google after the new site has gone live. It will be converted from html/css design to a PHP based CMS with added functionality such as filtering, sorting etc.

I'm aware of some of the preventative measures that can be done to prevent loss of rankings (e.g. 301 redirects) but are there any others and in your experiences have they been successful preventing the site dropping out of favor or losing rankings?

Kind regards

Rosh

[mosaicpro]

I think it depends on what the redesign consists in. For example a competitor of one of my clients has just redesigned their site but the difference is the old site had more relevancy to a specific keyword where as now the redesign is a general page that doesn't have as much relevancy to the specific keyword.

The result was a drop in rankings. So if you're a simple site with little content or poor structure it's a good thing to redesign... if it's the other way around where you focus more on design and not on content (SEO) i think you will have a drop in rankings

[MarieHaynes]

The results will be drastically different for every site, but I can tell you my experience.  I upgraded my site design last year and within a few months my traffic doubled.  My new site is much more professional and the SEO is improved as well.

[bizarro1000]

Yes, I will be keeping things like content, page titles, h1 the same as well as trying to keep the .html extension. The site doesn't have a folder structure currently but this may change for certain areas that need categories e. http://www.example.com/news/todays-news.html so this could be one area that I need to 301.

[bizarro1000]

Thanks EGOL, that's the kind of positive thinking I need. I had considered the onsite-SEO improvements but have most definitely been focusing more on what bad things might happen after when there could be good things to arise.

[Aftermath_SEO]

Generally, a redesign shouldn't hurt your rankings as long as you keep your general SEO approach the same (i.e. keyword density, and other on page SEO that has proven successful to you).

However with that being said, are you going to be changing any of the names or extensions of your pages? And if so, are they in subfolders?

If you switch from .html to .php, you will lose rankings unless these pages are in subfolders which would not change the url. If you are going to switch extensions, the best thing for you to do would be to keep the old pages live, and 301 or canonicalize them.

[EGOL]

Lots of people think about "redesign" and they should be thinking about "redesign and reSEO".

When you change your design that is a great time to kick your SEO up a notch.

Your site was probably designed a few years ago and now google has changed and your knowledge has changed (that's why you visit SEOmoz, right?)....

.... so you should have some great SEO ideas that you are excited will advance your site instead of sweating about a rankings drop.

What can you do  to IMPROVE your SEO?

Breadcrumb links?  More in-content links?   Social share buttons?   Features to cross-promote content?   Cool things to make your site "sticky"?   Fix your canonicals?

You want to come out of this redesign kicking ass!