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
-
How to properly setup a website for the first time
Good morning, I am fairly proficient at SEO and understand a lot of the required elements - but am in no way an expert, which is why I am here now. We are in the process of setting up a brand new website (true PHP -Laravel) This will be for a nationwide website and will need to attract from the north, south, east and west. Although I have no worries about putting my domain out here, the site is not live and I don't want to possibly have a broken link pointing to me before I even launch - so I will give you an example URL and work from there. I will tell you it is a DOT Rentals website and we will call the business Widgets. So the URL is Widgets.Rentals There is no .com, .net - nothing. It is an exact match domain. The site operates as peer to peer - meaning customers will upload their widgets, photos, etc. of their widgets for rent. Now, having said that, let me ask this. If you were setting up this website - how would you recommend we do this right - right from the beginning? Since the customers (not the vendors) will search for widget rentals in a specific location - would you recommend that we maintain Geo Location with Google with a URL like this? Widget.Rentals/Orlando-Florida-beautiful-widgets-for-rent-at-a-great-price Or is it better to not Geo Locate? Widget.Rentals/beautiful-widgets-for-rent-at-a-great-price
Web Design | | Blitzburgh
I have a lot more in regards to setting up the site like Title bars, headers 1, 2, 3 - Alt text images, etc. But for now would appreciate the collective best advice from the group. Mike0 -
Multiple H1 Tags for different section on one webpage in HTML5 Website? Should I have only one?
https://www.tcs.com website has multiple H1 tag on around 40 out of 1000 pages. Webpage has different section and each section is important that's why used multiple H1 tag (one h1 for each section) **I understand, google will not penalize for multiple H1. But having multiple H1, for site like tcs, is it good or should use only one H1 tag? **Pls check https://www.tcs.com to see heading tag(6 heading tag used).
Web Design | | JayprakashSEO0 -
URL Re-Mapping Question ?. Do I need to the theme of my business in my url struture even though GWT knows what my site is about
Hi All, I have currently planning to do some url remapping on my Hire Website as alot of most important pages are far to many levels deep from the root domain. This is also making my sitemap not tidy etc. In GWT, Google knows that the theme is my website is Hire as it's the top word. Therefore do I still need to use the word hire in all my new url categories / structures or not ? Examples http://goo.gl/BFmvk2 I was thinking of remapping to www.xxxxxxx.xco.uk/tool-hire-birmingham http://goo.gl/pC9Bdp I was thinking of remapping to www.xxxxxx.co.uk/cleaning-equipment Notice in the later example , I do not have the word rent in the url. Any advice is much appreciated thanks peter
Web Design | | PeteC120 -
Google text-only vs rendered (index and ranking)
Hello, can someone please help answer a question about missing elements from Google's text-only cached version.
Web Design | | cpawsgo
When using JavaScript to display an element which is initially styled with display:none, does Google index (and most importantly properly rank) the elements contents? Using Google's "cache:" prefix followed by our pages url we can see the rendered cached page. The contents of the element in question are viewable and you can read the information inside. However, if you click the "Text-only version" link on the top-right of Google’s cached page, the element is missing and cannot be seen. The reason for this is because the element is initially styled with display:none and then JavaScript is used to display the text once some logic is applied. Doing a long-tail Google search for a few sentences from inside the element does find the page in the results, but I am not certain that is it being cached and ranked optimally... would updating the logic so that all the contents are not made visible by JavaScript improve our ranking or can we assume that since Google does return the page in its results that everything is proper? Thank you!0 -
SEO Value to Improving HTML Code of Website That Validates According to W3C?
Greetings MOZ Community: My real estate website www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, originally designed in Drupal, was relaunched using Wordpress in 2013. The code for all URLs validates. The relaunch was performed by developers in Argentina. As part of an SEO campaign, I very reputable design/coding company in the has provided new wire frames to correct useability issues holding back conversions. In the course of the design adjustments they inspected the code and have told me that it is inefficient, that a number of shortcuts were taken and that the code does not conform to Wordpress best practices. What concerns me most is their claim that the quality of coding makes it more difficult for Google to index the site and this may be detrimental to ranking. Is it possible for the original developers to clean up this code if the deficiencies are pointed out to them? Or once coding shortcuts are taken are they impossible to fix? Would it make sense for me to request that the new design team put together a list of HTML deficiencies and provide to the original developers and ask them to correct? I am spending tens of thousands of dollars on content optimization, content marketing. It would be absurd if these coding issues would ultimately prevent improvement in ranking and traffic. At the same time, I hate to be a cynic but the domestic design/coding firm, while being very professional, does have an incentive in getting me to ditch the original design so I commit to an costly rebranding. If these issues are really minor maybe it is not worth making the effort to clean up the code (assuming that is even possible) and focus the budget on content marketing. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | Kingalan10 -
Responsive design and Google analytics mobile tracking codes?
Hi all, We are currently rebuilding a site using responsive design, however i have just had a thought. On another site where we have a mobile site under a sub-directory we utilise mobile tracking codes as we found that this was far more accurate for recording visits. On a responsive design site evidently all pages, desktop and mobile, will be under the same URL, yet the content will adjust to the screen size of the device. Should we also change the tracking code to be mobile code on the lower resolutions or would the same code be sufficient?
Web Design | | Sarbs0 -
Tips on website redesign on site with messy URLs?
So I've inherited quite a messy website. It was in drupal and the owner wants it in wordpress. One of the problems is the link paths. Should I try to recreate them exactly? i.e. something/somethingelse/page/ or use redirects (which I'm not confident in doing). Also, some of the pages end in .html, others in a back slash and others without slahes, there's no consistency. Do you have any tips in general? I remember an older seomoz blogpost about successful website relaunches (with press releases and mass emails and stuff being sent out on launch to boot). Thanks!
Web Design | | seonubblet0 -
Where should I spend Money on my website?
My website is www.capitolshine.com what do you think? Where should I spend money to enhance SEO search results? I do have a limited budget but the company is growing quickly and I might have more funds to invest in a few months. Where should I spend money now (less than $500 per month) and where should I spend money in the future? I am afraid the person who coded my website wasn't well versed on SEO. There also might be coding errors. I'm trying to work through the errors myself via the repots from SEOmoz.
Web Design | | CapitolShine0