New Re-design will my website rankings drop?
-
Hi guys,
I have had to re-design my site although we are only 4 months into the seo game we have seen some good progress with our rankings. My question is there anything I need to consider before implementing the new designs so it doesn't effect my current rankings or any of our SEO work.
Our current designs are content thing and so we have had to create more content to better optimize our site, however if doing so will this loose our current ranking position?
Apperciate any advice around this
Thanks
-
I had a couple of people who worked on our SEO a few times but we never really got much good advice. The best advice I have had so far comes from MOZ and our most recent SEO guy, and people such as yourself. Asking these questions on moz helps reduce it.
-
I do that too. When I do a redesign, I always hire someone who knows more about SEO than I to do a site assessment and look for opportunities. It is well worth the cost. In fact it can bring payback of many times what you pay.
I do have some fear in this process too, but getting the good advice and doing things very carefully reduces that to a low level.
-
Thanks Shiv, much appreciate the feedback
-
Great thanks so much! Looks like a test dummy and screaming frog is the answer
-
Thanks so much for your help Dirk, Great idea, I'll definitely look into that.
-
Thank you Donna, will check it out
-
Hi EGOL
Thanks for your feedback. Yes there is an element of fear in there, I'm new to SEO so still trying to get my head around it all, hence why I'm here getting the assistance required to take these next steps. I have already re-designed the site, now it is ready to implement so I'm looking to see what needs to be considered before implementing the designs from an SEO point.
-
In my opinion... "How can I preserve my rankings during a site redesign?" is the wrong question.
It is the question asked by fearful people instead of by the person who is motivated to win.
If you are going to put the work of a redesign into your website, you should do the job right, do a careful evaluation and determine how the optimization, structure, SEO performance and conversion rate can be improved.
Use this as a time to study, get qualified assistance and make some clear gains.
When will you have time and the money to do these things properly again?
If you go into this and the SEO is fixated on avoiding loss, says nothing of opportunities and how you are going to kick things up a notch then you are wasting your time and have hired the wrong person.
-
I like this how to retain at least 95% of your organic traffic guide from quick sprout. Very helpful. b-s.ee/1pvTWfc
-
If it's just design that changes it will normally have no negative impact on your site - if you do a good job it could even improve your rankings if user experience improves (increase time/visit, time/page & lower bounce rate)
If it has impact on your site structure I would do as ofw12387 : deploy a test site & use Screaming Frog to do a full audit:
- crawl your current site - export everything to xls
- crawl the new version of the site - based on the url's of the first crawl to check if everything is properly redirected
Export the results and compare with the original results in xls. - Do a final crawl on the new site (spider mode) - to see that all url's are accessible & that the site structure didn't change (pushing content deeper in the site)
If you have traffic on image search - also check that the position & the names of the images are not changing.
Good luck with the redesign,
Dirk
-
Please make sure the URL structure remains same in new website, as SEO majorly depends upon permalinks(URLs).
-
If you do a good job, you will not lose any ranking.
You should:
-
Check that all the meta tags / canonicals / titles reminds as before
-
Be sure that the url structure reminds exactly as before
I would recommend you not go process the modification directly in production. Use a dummy server for it and check with Screaming FROG that everything is ok. And then, when you are sure everything looks ok, go to production
-
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
-
Ranking drop after new website
Hi there, I have a new client who has just had a new website built (by someone else). It was quite a major change as it was 12 years old and has just been moved to Wordpress. However although they are by and large happy with the new site, they have lost a lot of their rankings in Google. The content and menu structure is apparently identical. I told them I didn't think this was unusual but I'm not sure how easy it will be to get them ranking again. Where are they likely to be starting from? Is it a case of starting from the beginning or will there be some residual ranking capability left over? Or can they expect a full recovery over time? I was going to start by looking to see if things like tagging and meta data has been filled in (I will add the site to my Moz account) but is there any way of comparing the old site with the new for SEO purposes? Thanks so much, Sarah.
Web Design | | Frog-Marketing0 -
How does Google rank a "Site:yourexamplesite.com" Query
Hi All, Sorry for the potentially confusing title. I am trying to find out how google ranks the pages of your site when you search "site:yourwebsite.com". When I did this with my website I was surprised what pages showed up on the first page, there were sub-category pages in the top 5 results and top level category pages that weren't on the first page. I have been unable to find information as to how google returns these results, is it the same algorithm/factors that make pages rank highly in a regular search, or does it have something to do with how recently google crawled these pages. Any feedback would be helpful. Additionally, if anyone has worked through a similar scenario I would be interested to know if there were any insights you gained from finding out which of your pages google returned first. Thanks for the help! Jason
Web Design | | Jason-Reid0 -
What factors make a ranking difference between Desktop and Mobile?
Hi all, What makes a website rank better on mobile? Usually page load speed and mobile responsiveness matters and makes a difference to rank w website better on mobile than desktop. our website is surprisingly ranking better on Mobile but not much on desktop. What might influenced here in improvement in mobile ranking and drop in desktop? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Responsive design to serve different page for IE8 - SEO Implications?
A client is planning on developing a responsive designed website which redirects visitors using IE8 to a static webpage that encourages users to visit in another browser. What are the SEO implications of a server redirect just for IE8 visitors? Possible solutions: would containing a link on the static page to "continue browsing" and give the visitor access to the entire site in IE8 work well? Or should a CSS overlay message appear to IE8 visitors, no redirect, that encourages them to visit in another browser? Or serving a separate stylesheet for IE8 visitors, and not giving a responsive experience be optimal? Any suggestions or thoughts are appreciated. Cheers, Alex
Web Design | | Alex.Weintraub0 -
Duplicate Content? Designing new site, but all content got indexed on developer's sandbox
An ecommerce I'm helping is getting a complete redesign. Their developer had a sandbox version of their new site for design & testing. Several thousand products were loaded into the sandbox site. Then Google/Bing crawled and indexed the site (because developer didn't have a robots.txt), picking up and caching about 7,200 pages. There were even 2-3 orders placed on the sandbox site, so people were finding it. So what happens now?
Web Design | | trafficmotion
When the sandbox site is transferred to the final version on the proper domain, is there a duplicate content issue?
How can the developer fix this?0 -
Redirect From .aspx to .html if already indexed - Website Redesign
Hi Guys I would like to know if somebody could possibly shed some light on this for me. We are in the process of re-designing our site, but we are keeping all of our content in terms of site structure, internal linking etc. the same. Now we were wondering if it would be a SEO best practice for us to change our pages' extension from .aspx to .html and just put a re-direct from the aspx to the html pages. Or should we keep everything as is, and maybe just revise our on-page seo efforts as well as do some more link-building. I just have to note that we are currently ranking very well for top positions and obviously all these pages are already nicely indexed. And then another question I have is with regards to our mobi site of this same website.Our dev team created it using Responsive Web Design, but they decided to implement techniques that show and hide content based on what device you are viewing it on. So when viewing it on your desktop, it will show content as per normal, but when viewing it on a mobile device it will hide this content and show the content formatted for that specific mobile device. So we are obviously sitting with a case of dup content here.Is this technique acceptable, or is there a workaround/different way of implementing this? Thanks In Advance Dave
Web Design | | DavidZA10 -
Best Way to Re-Direct traffic from existing site to new site?
Good Morning, I have an existing site (http://goo.gl/QKkpi) running on a slow server. We decided to create a new site (http://goo.gl/XUH3f) with the intention of de-commissioning the first one. Both sites are on the same WMT account. What is the best way to permanently redirect any backlinks/traffic (all levels, from home page to product pages) from the old site to the new site (prior to shutting down the first one). Thanks a lot!
Web Design | | Prime850 -
Removing important section of website, safely
Hi Mozzers, It's been requested that a top level page on a website I'm working on should be removed. It concerns me firstly because there are some nice links coming into that page. I'm also worried because website director has suggested the menu option for that page should simply be removed from all navigation, so you can't find the 'removed' page via his website, but it remains as an indexed page passing linkjuice to website. Is that a risky approach from an SEO perspective? What's the best approach to this? Thanks in advance! Luke
Web Design | | McTaggart0