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
-
Our protected pages 302 redirect to a login page if not a member. Is that a problem for SEO?
We have a membership site that has links out in our unprotected pages. If a non-member clicks on these links it sends a 302 redirect to the login / join page. Is this an issue for SEO? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | rimix1 -
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Site Migration Questions
Hello everyone, We are in the process of going from a .net to a .com and we have also done a complete site redesign as well as refreshed all of our content. I know it is generally ideal to not do all of this at once but I have no control over that part. I have a few questions and would like any input on avoiding losing rankings and traffic. One of my first concerns is that we have done away with some of our higher ranking pages and combined them into one parallax scrolling page. Basically, instead of having a product page for each product they are now all on one page. This of course has made some difficulty because search terms we were using for the individual pages no longer apply. My next concern is that we are adding keywords to the ends of our urls in attempt to raise rankings. So an example: website.com/product/product-name/keywords-for-product if a customer deletes keywords-for-product they end up being re-directed back to the page again. Since the keywords cannot be removed is a redirect the best way to handle this? Would a canonical tag be better? I'm trying to avoid duplicate content since my request to remove the keywords in urls was denied. Also when a customer deletes everything but website.com/product/ it goes to the home page and the url turns to website.com/product/#. Will those pages with # at the end be indexed separately or does google ignore that? Lastly, how can I determine what kind of loss in traffic we are looking at upon launch? I know some is to be expected but I want to avoid it as much as I can so any advice for this migration would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Sika220 -
SEO URLs?
What are the best practices for generating SEO-friendly headlines? dashes between words? underscores between words? etc. Looking for a programatically generated solution that's using editor-written headlines to produce an SEO-friendly URL Thanks.
Technical SEO | | ShaneHolladay0 -
Caching Problem !
Hi Webmasters, I have been getting a problem and that is caching problem. I have a SEO blog glanceseo.com and now i am facing caching problem. It takes something 2 months for caching. I want to solve it, please suggest me something... Thanks in advance
Technical SEO | | shubhamtiwari0 -
SEO friendldy Site structure?
we are in the process or rewriting all the pages on one of our sites and will be changing some urls around. i was just wondering if dashes or underscores are better in the urls SEO wise? www.site.com/word-word-word/ or
Technical SEO | | 858-SEO
www.site.com/word_word_word/ i personally like the underscores better but some colleagues tell me that dashes are better, any tests out there on this issue?? Thanks0 -
Removing robots.txt on WordPress site problem
Hi..am a little confused since I ticked the box in WordPress to allow search engines to now crawl my site (previously asked for them not to) but Google webmaster tools is telling me I still have robots.txt blocking them so am unable to submit the sitemap. Checked source code and the robots instruction has gone so a little lost. Any ideas please?
Technical SEO | | Wallander0 -
Problem wth Crawling
Hello, I have a website http://digitaldiscovery.eu here in SEOmoz. Its strange since the last week SEOmoz is crawling only one page! And before it was crwaling all the pages. Whats happening? Help SEOmoz! :))
Technical SEO | | PedroM0