What have your experiences with rankings after a redesign?
-
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
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
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
-
Redesign Just Starting - Should I Leave The Previous Incomplete Site or Setup A Temporary Holding Page and Redirect Previous URL'S?
Hi All I've picked up a new website project and wanted to ask about the best way to proceed with the current site during the development process. The current site is incomplete although it has been live for a while and has over 80 pages in the sitemap. Link to site https://tinyurl.com/ychwftup The business owner wants to take down the current site and simply add a landing page stating "new website coming soon". From an SEO perspective, am I better to keep the current site live until the new site is ready? Or would it not make any difference if I setup the landing page and add 301 redirects from each page in the sitemap to the landing page. Many Thanks In Advance For Any Assistance
Web Design | | ruislip180 -
Is it ever OK to exclude googlebot from geoip experience?
We currently use geoip detection to present a dialog when customers access one of our country-specific sites other than the one matching their location, asking them to select whether to continue to that requested site, or else click a link to the site matching their IP location's country.The purpose is to diminish the likelihood of users having a bad experience if they accidentally shop a region's site only to discover when they get to checkout that they cannot complete the purchase and need to switch sites. We are considering adding some logic to prevent this dialog from appearing if the user agent is a known search engine bot. The dialog serves no purpose to bots, and we are worried about its impact on crawling of our sites from servers outside the country-site's location. That said, we don't want to incur any negative impact of perceived cloaking. Is user agent-specific logic acceptable practice in this scenario?
Web Design | | seoelevated1 -
How to optimise non-homepage to beat homepage in rankings? Are we on right path?
Hi all, We have a page with "keyword" in slug like "website.com/keyword" where our homepage is "website.com". This "keyword" difficulty is very high, so every minor factor contributing here and we have noticed competitors' pages with "keyword" in URL ranking. Then we also planned to rank this page "website.com/keyword" and interlinked high, so it'll be favoured by Google which didn't happen. So may be we should reduce the interlinking to homepage and optimise this keyword page more to rank for this keyword. Still I doubt the chances of ranking this page is difficult and need much more. How to make this page ranked replacing homepage? If there are no options for this, we are planning to redirect our homepage to this page; so Google will slowly adopt it. Suggestions please. Thank you.
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Image with 100% width/height - bad ranking?
Hi, we have some articles like this: http://www.schicksal.com/Orakel/Freitag-13 The main image has a width of 100% and a height of 100%. Today, I've discovered that GWT Instant Preview has some troubles with rendering the page. We have CSS rules to deliver the image with the right dimensions. If a bot like google is not sending any screen height / width we assume the screen size is 2560x1440. Does this harm the ranking of the page? (Content starts below the fold/image) What is a "default" screen size for google? How do they determine if something is "above the fold"? Any tips or ideas? Best wishes, Georg.
Web Design | | GeorgFranz0 -
Site Doing Horrible After Redesign
Hello Fellow Forum Members: Thank you all for taking the time to read this. This is in follow up to one of my previous questions, but I now have more information. I will try to be as concise as possible and want to sincerely thank anybody who invests time in answering this. Around February 9, 2013, we launched our new site on the Bigcommerce platform. We moved from Volusion after 6 years. We had paid the Bigcommerce partner for an upgraded 301 redirect package as I was thoroughly concerned about losing rankings. By the end of February our rankings were diminishing. We expected a slight dip due to the new site. As of May, our organic traffic had dropped by 82%. Google WMT is showing 1500+ 404 errors. Many have to do with review page type URLs and some were just plain never redirected apparently. In May, we hired a wonderful SEO company that is a heavy contributor to the Moz community. They have been generous and wonderful to work with. By the end of this last week it was determined that most of the coding suggestions our SEO was making could NOT be implemented in Bigcommerce because Bigcommerce will not allow access to the PHP files by our developer, thus hindering the execution of these suggestions. Some of these were move the blog to the root, use canonical on the home page, use canonical for pagination, stop the indexing of https URLs and a few more. Today, June 25 we are at a complete loss and trying to just keep our business alive. The opinion of both the SEO and the developer is that my choice of Bigcommerce as a platform was not the best. So my main question is what are the odds our rankings have decreased due to the lack of 301 redirects during our migration to Bigcommerce versus the rankings decreasing do to Bigcommerce being a bad choice as a platform? We are being advised to redevelop our entire site on an Open Source platorm such as Wordpress or Magento, but if that's not needed I certainly don't want to have to do that. I hope I have provided a decent amount of history and information. Thank you for any help/advice you are willing to offer.
Web Design | | josh3300 -
Redesigning a really old Website with old-fashioned permalinks
Hey SEO-Pros, I'm currently redesigning a quite old website, with the following URL structure: TLD/category/category.php?interview_id=819 The new Version will be a little more SEO-friendly: TLD/interviews/name-of-interview/ I know I have to do a 301-Redirect for all the old URLs to the new ones in order to keep the (until now pretty good) Google Ranking. If the rankings drop after the redesign has been done, I'll surely get killed 😉 So, Is there any easy way of creating these 301-Redirects (must be thousands of URLs...)? Best Regards guys and thanks for your help!
Web Design | | dominator0 -
Advice on migrating from .com to .co.uk without dropping in rank?
I have a retail business in the UK whose website has *.com address and it has taken 3 years to reach a page rank of 3. We are building an updated site which will have a completely new url structure and optimized for SEO. We are considering launching the new site at a *.co.uk as we understand this will have advantages in local search and ranking as we are primarily targeting UK traffic. Does anyone have comments on **.com vs .co.uk and/or have any advice on how to handle the migration while minimizing any drop in traffic and ranking?
Web Design | | brian.james0