Website Redesign - Will it hurt SERP?
-
Hi - I am planning to redesign my blog and I was wondering if this will affect my rankings?
The new website template (custom designed) is much more user and seo friendly. The content, url structure, internal linking structure, meta tags, and site structure will remain exactly the same, but the visual design will be different (new sidebar widgets, and slightly different layout on inner pages).
The current website is ranking very well (mostly top 5), has a healthy backlink profile, strong social media presence, and great traffic.
I have heard that switching to a new template will dramatically hurt the rankings. Is this true? Are there any exceptions? Any ways I can prevent the rankings from dropping?
Would really appreciate your input. Thanks in advance.
Howard
-
Matthew, much appreciated.
Thankfully I don't need to worry about redirects since it's just a transition to a new template. About 90% of the other elements will remain intact.
Checking webmaster tools after the transition sounds really helpful.
ps. Thanks to everyone for your great responses!
-
Thanks for the detailed answer. This, in itself, could make a great article
After reviewing the items you mentioned, I actually realized some of the things I had neglected.
Apparently after transferring all the content to the demo website, some of the elements had changed, including: date of the posts, H tags, Authors, and few of the meta tags. So glad I caught your response in time to fix those issues.
For the most part, the new site is an improved version of the current site so if the rankings drop, I'll be surprised.
After I make the transition, I'll let you know the results. Hopefully this could make a good case scenario for the community.
Thanks again!
Howard
-
I think you have a good approach to this, and so, all things being the same, a refresh of the site should not hurt.
You mention that "content, url structure, internal linking structure" will all remain the same - if this is true and you keep everything in this bracket 'as-is' then you should be fine.
The most common reason rankings are lost when implementing a new site is re-directs, or the lack a redirect strategy to be more clear.
As your site structure / url structure is going to remain in-tack, then you wont really need to consider mass redirects.
However, here is what I would do just in case:
Before Launch:
Create a report of top linked to pages using Open Site Explore
Create a report of top content from the last few months from Google Analytics
Map all the URLs from the current site, use screaming from or something
After Launch:
Submit XML sitemap to webmaster tool
Review and improve on-page content
Monitor traffic in Google analytics, view top content for the period after launch and compare to the report you created prior to launch
Monitor and fix crawl errors in webmaster tools if any
Attract new links
Submit new XML sitemap (two weeks post launch)
Keep developing great content
-
keep it simple. The work and how much your rankings will change (usually just temporary) will be dependent on what you focus to work on and how big the site is
Just do things one at a time.
- Make sure you fix all errors ASAP (images, internal links etc)
- Redirect the old urls to the new urls
- Make sure the speed of loading is the same of faster.
- Basically, just do things quickly and optimise.
Run screaming frog after and fix all the remaining errors. Youll probably see more errors in webmaster tools once your site gets recrawled but those will probably be easy fixes.
Remember, just focus and get it done ASAP and youll be fine.
-
This is a tough question to answer. Technically yes, your SERPs will probably change. Hurt? That's hard to say.
I'm going to list a few reasons your SERs may change. I don't want to argue with everyone about which factors matter, etc. but these are some potential reasons your rankings may change (and other SEOs may disagree on which of these actually matter. I'm including them for the sake of completeness and to show that there are MANY reasons a site change will bounce your rankings.)
These are just some things that may change:
1) Site speed. You could be faster (better design, fewer big images) or you could be slower (that would hurt your rankings.)
2) Site structure. If you had a Wordpress site for instance that used to list all your post titles as H2 and your subheadings as H3 and now all your titles are H3, that is likely to at least somewhat affect your structure and yes, you may see some SERP changes.
3) Code / text ratio/density whatever you want to call it. Most SEOs will tell you very straightforwardly that "keyword density" is dead. And yet we've tested that this is a moderation thing. If you have a word too many times, you get penalized. Too few and it's just assumed to be one word among many, not a topic. The hint is to fall somewhere between say oh I dunno, 2 and 30 for most pages, right? Now, I've done a test that suggested if the word was on the page say 15 times and that was 2% of the whole page text, it wouldn't be penalized. Same word, same 15 times, and reduce the extraneous code so it's 10%? Gets penalized every time. So while on page keyword density is dead, MY (albeit flawed) study told me that changing code tremendously could affect your keywords if you tend to be on the higher (penalty) end.
**4) Validation. **Again, I'm being controversial and I understand many SEOs disagree with this one. However, you're asking what "may" hurt - and if your site was 100% valid before (or close) and it has a lot of errors now, that would (in my opinion) affect your SEO.
5) Page Age. Hurt or help - it's hard to say. Google normally prefers fresh content so you may actually see some improvements on this. However, when Google has "seasoned in" your pages and you change them, they aren't always 100% awesome at getting your rank exactly the same after any sort of change or even date update. (We had a news site for awhile that had ranking issues because older articles would get their "last edited" date updated frequently and Google would often drop older, successful URLs back 3-4 pages when we updated. It made no sense but ... ya, Google.)
6) Page layout. Google quality guideliens say that "the page layout on the highest quality pages makes the main content immediately visible." If your update makes more or less content show up "above the fold" as it were, you may see SERP changes for better or worse.
7) Breadcrumbs and Navigation. If your old theme had poor (or amazing) navigation and the new one is opposite, you could see SERP movement for sure. Google loves its breadcrumbs. If you had them and removed them, you could fall a bit. If you didn't have them and you do now, you could rise. Breadcrumbs signal good user experience and Google rewards that.
Mobile optimization. If the old site wasn't responsive/mobile friendly and the new one is, that could affect your mobile SERPs (and possibly your desktop ones ... depending on how its implemented.)
9) Analytics. I've posited before that Google must use some data from Analytics - time on site, pages per visit, bounce rate, etc. .They seem to correlate VERY strongly with my "most visited pages" and those with the highest rank. I would suggest that if your user experience dramatically improves, your SERPs may as well.
10) Schema. You said the structure is essentially remaining the same but if the new one allows for review stars, authorshop markup, photo schema or whatnot, that could improve SERP position.
-
Google will have to spider the site before any loss in rankings due to design, right? So, if there is a drop in rankings, it won't necessarily be recovered in a re-index.
But, so long as there are no errors and the site remains the same structurally and content wise, there shouldn't necessarily be any issue. Even if there are no errors with the new theme as far as SEO goes, if the new design affects the load speed, this could affect the ranking of your page.
-
That is only truth if the new theme that you are going to use has errors. If it has been SEO'ed and all the content will be the same, you may some rankings decline until Google spiders the new site and re index it. But that shouldn't take very long.
You need to think on the users first, will the users love the new site? If they will, then Google will follow, don't worry about that.
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
-
Move To a full new Website
Hey everyone, I'm going to change my website's Domain, Server, CMS and Theme I can't find any full & detailed answer to how to do that without losing anything, is anybody here has a full resource or could tell me a how-to checklist for doing that. Thanks in advance,
Web Design | | Mahmoud.ahmad.taha0 -
Pagerank and SERP rankings downhill after site update
Our site underwent a major update in September 2012. We put the entire site in WordPress and did away with our static pages. Then, in February 2013, we moved our shopping cart pages from a subdomain to our main domain (in WordPress). In both cases, we had to implement a massive 301 redirect through htaccess as most of our URLs changed with the update. Our site consists of the shopping cart (WooCommerce), blog, and supporting pages. We noticed traffic starting to drop around the last week of November (2012) and it has steadily declined ever since. None of our shop pages have a pagerank with virtually all them showing a gray bar with question mark. Only the shop homepage has some pagerank -- that too from 4 previously to 2 now. Some of the words we used to rank very well for before, we don't even show in the first five pages anymore. At first, we thought it was a temporary situation that would self correct over time, but it doesn't seem to get better at all. All said, we have lost over 80% of our traffic from Google organic. Upon repeated reviews, the 301 redirects seem to be done correctly and we don't see any serious mistakes that could cause such a huge drop. So the question is are we missing something? Are we not looking at the right places? Any ideas where we might start looking? We're simply looking for ideas and a fresh perspective.
Web Design | | bizmanuals0 -
Will google penalize a website for using a table layout?
I just got a new client today and his entire website layout and structure is using tables instead of divs. This client is on a tight budget and wants to avoid unnecessary hours for re-coding the website, but at the same time he wants me to improve his SEO organically. This is the first time I've been asked to do work on an existing website that uses pure tables for the entire layout and I'm wondering if this effects the SEO in any way. So my question is, will tables effect rankings and SEO in any way?
Web Design | | ScottMcPherson0 -
Website 'stolen', no contact details
Hi all, Wondering if anyone could help out here, good a very strange issue.... Went into Google Webmaster Tools and looked at the incoming links to a client's site (new client, only just gained access to WMT) and noticed 2563 links coming from a domain. Upon viewing said domain it is a 100% copy of the clients site, I mean 100%; the phone numbers, email address etc are still pointing to the client's site. Everything is the same, the pages, the navigation etc. When I click on a link on the copy site it loads the same pages but at their site, the internal linking points to the version of the pages on their site. It seems to be an ongoing thing because the last time the client updated their blog was last week and this is on the copy site. Obviously this cannot be helping with regard to seo. The client knows nothing about it so not come from them. The copy site is indexed in Google!!. The first thing to do is to contact these people and ask what they are doing. This is proving to be easier said than done, the contact details (as mentioned above) on the pages still point back to the client and the whois gives no details. What would be the first step to take here? Obviously there is the whole legal area about stolen content but that can wait until we have the site down and out of Google. Is there somewhere in Google to report things such as this? I will speak to client and if they are happy I will share both the domains in question, they know I am seeking alternative opinions Many thanks Carl
Web Design | | GrumpyCarl0 -
Site redesign and links?
I have a real estate website. On my sidebar I have about 16 links to pages on various neighborhoods. I templated my site using dream weaver so the same sidebar and links are on every page. I'm thinking of redesigning the sidebar and having one link that will take visitors to a page where all the neighborhood links will be and then from there visitors can choose whichever link to go to a specific neighborhood info page. I am doing this to clear space on my side bar for other content and links. What impact would this have on my home page? The website is bronxpad.com if anyone wants to check it out and provide feedback.
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Neck and Neck with competitor on SERP
Our company's competitor has just ranked higher on google SERP. I need pointers on getting back to #2. We are currently #3 (sts.travel.com), while Wikipedia is #1 When googling "Spring break". Any suggestions? We are a reputable student travel company. WE have a ton of content and am not sure why we just fell behind in rankings. Any suggestions or insight would be much appreciated!
Web Design | | Vacations0 -
Sudden dramatic drops in SERPs along with no snippet and no cached page?
We are a very stable, time tested domain (over 15 yrs old) with thousands of stable, time tested inbound links. We are a large catalog/e commerce business and our web team has over a decade's experience with coding, seo etc. We do not engage in link exchanges, buying links etc and adhere strictly to best white hat seo practices. Our SERPs have generally been very stable for years and years. We continually update content, leverage user generated content etc, and stay abreast of important algorithm and policy changes on Google's end. On Wednesday Jan 18th, we noticed dramatic, disturbing changes to our SERPs. Our formerly very stable positions for thousands of core keywords dropped. In addition, there is no snippet in the SERPs and no cached page for these results. Webmaster tools shows our sitemap most recently successfully downloaded by Google on Jan 14th. Over the weekend and monday the 16th, our cloud hosted site experienced some downtime here and there. I suspect that the sudden issues we are seeing are being caused by one of three possibilities: 1. Google came to crawl when the site was unavailable.
Web Design | | jamestown
However, there are no messages in the account or crawl issues otherwise noted to indicate this. 2. There is a malicious link spam or other attack on our site. 3. The last week of December 2011, we went live with Schema.org rich tagging on product level pages. The testing tool validates all but the breadcrumb, which it says is not supported by Schema. Could Google be hating our Schema.org microtagging and penalizing us? I sort of doubt bc category/subcategory pages that have no such tags are among those suffering. Whats odd is that ever since we went live with Schema.org, Google has started preferring very thin content pages like video pages and articles over our product pages. This never happened in the past. the site is: www.jamestowndistributors.com Any help or ideas are greatly, greatly appreciated. Thank You DMG0 -
Can i do this? Will Google penalize me?
I have a page for a Criminal Defense Attorney and i set up a list of the type of criminal charges he is certified to deal with. I wanted to use title tags and put the Keyword "Miami Criminal Defense Attorney" & "Miami Traffic Defense Lawyer"... My question is will Google penalize me for plugging the same Key words over and over on the title tag for each ?? CHECK THE IMAGE to see what I'm talking about... thanks guys. x97dl
Web Design | | marig0