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
-
Setting up analytics for a website redesign
Hey all, so in the past when I make changes to a site, I make the changes, review the analytics in the wake of the changes, analyze and go from there. Little things here and there, no biggie. With my new company, we're doing a full website redesign from scratch (Currently on Wordpress, moving to custom). They are asking me about analytics and reporting and I was hoping to get some insight here. When the new site is ready, they are launching it at www2.ourdomain.com and sending 25% of traffic to ourdomain.com to that with the other 75% going to www.ourdomain.com (current site). So two questions- how would you go about setting up analytics for that? And how do you ensure the www2 version doesn't get indexed but stay in Google's good graces? If you de-index your "home page" that 25% are seeing I can't imagine that's helpful for SEO. Hopefully that makes sense! Trying to look at how to A/B test to ensure the new site is working and converting before pushing all traffic to it.
Web Design | | DanDeceuster0 -
Will having two wordpress themes installed hurt seo?
We currently have 3 sites built on WordPress that have little to no blogging capabilities. Currently, all published posts show up on a /category page which does not resemble the traditional blog format and is not aesthetically pleasing. We would like to have a more traditional blog and are considering installing a second wordpress theme on the site which will strictly be used for /blog and all the posts. My question is will having the second WordPress installation on the sites hurt us in any way on the SEO front and if we go this way should we place the install in a subfolder or on a subdomain? Is there anything else we need to worry about with making this transition? Thank you in advance for the advice! Patrick
Web Design | | PlanetDISH0 -
Multilingual website in Belgium?
Hi Mozzers, I have a question about a multilingual website for a client for us in Belgium. As you guys know in Belgium we speak French and Dutch. The situation:
Web Design | | WeAreDigital_BE
At the moment we have client.be for the Dutch version of the website and client.be/fr for the French version. All tagged with href lang tags and webmaster tools. The client wants to build a new website. There are three possibilities: 1. We keep using subfolders (same configuration as the current situation). In my head this would be my first choice. 2. We just let them build two separate domains.
client-keywordindutch.be & client-keywordinfrench.be 3. We use subdomains. As the development company is not sure that it is technically possible to use subdomains, I need to know which option is the next best one and which option you would give priority and why? Should we just push through with the subfolder? Thank you for your thoughts!
Sander0 -
Website organic traffic unchanged, impressions took a 98% drop in the last week.
Hi all, I have a very curious predicament and I'd be grateful if someone could shed some light on the situation. As mentioned in the title, organic traffic to our website has remained unchanged, but organic impressions have taken a 98% drop in the last week. This happened suddenly over one day; on October 22, impressions were 700, on October 23, they were 500, and on October 24 they drastically dropped to 50. The next two days they were at 22 and then up to 35. Organic traffic, however, showed the normal "weekend drop" as of October 24, and is still showing normal level (even increased a bit) continuing into this week. These are organic impressions according to Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools. We did perform a complete site redesign a month ago. Could this be an effect from the redesign? We also noticed drop in Domain Authority, but our competitors suffered a similar (if not greater) drop as well, so we wondered if it could be due in part to the algorithm update. If anyone could shed some light on the situation I would be so appreciative! Thanks!
Web Design | | Joanne_Pendon0 -
New Mobile Site Traffic Drop
With all the talk about how much mobile is important and how it is going to return its own search results, we finally decided to make a mobile site for one of our smaller websites to test the water. We put it up about two weeks ago and did Vary HTTP header method to serve the site. Before the change, on the average week we would get 270-300 mobile visitors from organic search results and we converted 0.78% to sales. Since the change, we are now getting about 70 mobile organic visitors per week but converting 2.47% So what can I say but WOW. We are converting way way better but our organic mobile search traffic has dropped off a ton. Luckily our desktop and tablet traffic(we serve the desktop version of the site to tablets) has stayed the same and has not dipped. Do any of you guys have experience or gone through launching a mobile site before? Did you see the immediate drop in organic mobile traffic and did you recover your traffic back to previous levels? If so, do you know how long it takes to recover? I am thinking it is a big change and will take time for Google to adjust but I am not sure since the mobile version has so much less text now on the home page and on category or product list pages or whatever you guys want to call them.
Web Design | | KurtL0 -
Seo for design webinar ?
I've got no problem using google webfonts on their own, but what about using them over an image; specifically a clickable image? Its easiest to place text over an image if the image is a background image, but then the image isn't easy to make clickable. Am I missing something - this shouldn't be hard, right. Thanks!
Web Design | | saultie0 -
Website platform
I read through this 2008 Moz post and comments: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/choosing-the-right-cms-platform-for-your-website-from-an-seo-perspective but a few years have passed since the discussion. I am looking to completely revamp my site which is primarily static and built on WordPress, and create a rich community environment that is highly interactive and serves the visitor well. The question continues to come up why I'm using WP vs DotNet vs Drupal vs Juumla. The honest answer is: 1) it's easy for a non-tech like me to update, 2) seems like a lot of plugins are available for use, 3) has a high adoption rate (stable) But also, I kind of don't know what I don't know. I wanted to open up the conversation to see why others favor a specific platform as it relates to the following needs: Must be non-tech EASY to use (no high learning curve Lots of plugins and interoperability - can add and remove as needed/times change Must support forum/community needs and conversations Must be able to create granular authentication / permissions for different audiences to see "permissioned" content BONUS if it can interoperate with MS Dynamics CRM (unfortunately, sigh) I've been burned in the past by using teams that had a predilection for a platform simply because they were comfortable with it - not because it was right for my needs. I have a hard time understanding pro/con conversations if the technologies are too focused on the tech and not enough of what the technology delivers, and I'm naturally resistant to technologies that require a techie, rather than a marketing expert to use them.Thoughts anyone? Would love to hear Mozer opinions - thanks in advance 🙂
Web Design | | JeanieWalker0