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
-
Do more links from sub-domains to domain (website) hurt rankings?
Hi all, If there are multiple sub-domains like abc.website.com, 123.website.com, etc...and if the top pages of website are linked from multiple sub-domains via top menu or footer links; will this hurts? Will too much interlinking of few top pages of a website from it's sub-domains dilute link juice? How many links ideally we can add to website from a sub-domain? Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Is there an issue if we show our old mobile site to Google & new site to users
Hi, We have our existing mobile site that contains interlinking in footer & content and new mobile site that does not have interlinking. We will show existing mobile site to google crawler & new mobile site to users. Will this be taken as black hat by Google. The mobile site & desktop site will have same url across devices & browsers. Regards
Web Design | | vivekrathore0 -
Are jobsite themes harder to optimize than say a traditional website?
Until recently I have enjoyed a great deal of success with SEO on my websites and clients websites. SEO is more of a hobby than a profession for me however I am really struggling with my latest website www.securityjobsuk.co.uk - The keywords are easy, 1. security jobs and 2. security vacancies. The site has vanished off radar completely since I used the jobify theme. Has anyone had similar experience with job boards? Do they require more TLC / expert attention?
Web Design | | SJUK0 -
404's and a drop in Rank - Site maps? Data Highlighter?
I managed an old (2006 design) ticket site that was hosted and run by the same company that handled our point of sale. (Think, really crappy, customer had to click through three pages to get to the tickets, etc.) In Mid February, we migrated that old site to a new, more powerful site, built by a company that handles sites exclusively for ticket brokers. (My site: TheTicketKing. - dot - com) Before migration, I set up 301's for all the pages that we had currently ranked for, and had inbound links pointing to, etc. The CMS allowed me to set every one of those landing pages up with fresh content, so I created unique content for all of them, ran them through the Moz grader before launch, etc. We launched the site in Mid February, and it seemed like Google responded well. All the pages that we had 301's set up for stayed up fairly well in rank, and some even reached higher positions, while some took a few weeks to get back up to where they were before. Google was also giving us an average of 8-10K impressions per day, compared to 3000 per day with the old site. I started to notice a slow drop in impressions in mid April (after two months of love from Google,) and we lost rank on all our non branded pages around 4/23. Our branded terms are still fine, we didn't get a message from Google, and I reached out to the company that manages our site, asking if they had any issues with their other clients. They suggested that I resubmit our sitemaps. I did, and saw everything bump back up (impressions and rank) for just one week. Now we're back in the basement with all the non branded terms once again. I realize that Google could have penalized us without giving us a message, but what got me somewhat optimistic was the fact that resubmitting our sitemaps did bring us back up for around a week. One other thing that I was working on with the site just before the drop was Google's data highlighter. I submitted a set of pages that now come back with errors, after Google seemed to be fine with the data set before I submitted it. So now I'm looking at over 300 data highlighter errors when I'm in WMT. I deleted that set, but I still get the error listings in WMT, as if Google is still trying to understand those pages. Would that have an effect on our rank? Finally I do see that our 404's have risen steadily since the migration, to over 1000 now, and the people who manage the CMS tell me that it would have no effect on rank overall. And we're going to continue to get 404's as the nature of a ticket site would dictate? (Not sure on that, but that's what I was told.) Would anyone care to chime in on these thoughts, or any other clues as to my drop?
Web Design | | Ticket_King0 -
Website Drops Some Traffic after Redesign. What's Happening?
What it is NOT: No Link was broken. I have used Moz, Screaming Frog, Excel, etc - there are not broken links. We have not added spammy links. We kept the same amount of links and content on the homepage - with an exception of 1 or 2. All the pages remained canonical. Our blog uses rel=prev rel=next, and each page is canonicalized to itself. We do not index duplicated content. Our tags are content="noindex,follow" We are using the Genesis Framework (we were not before.) Load time is quicker - we now have a dedicated server. Webmaster tools has not reported any crawl report problems. What we did that should have improved our rankings and traffic: Implemented schema.org Responsive design Our bounce rate is down - Average visit length is up. Any ideas?
Web Design | | Thriveworks-Counseling0 -
Is Fall In Keyword Ranking After Launch of Revamped Website Normal
After launching my redesigned website (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) Google ranking has dropped significantly for competitive keywords. The previous version of the site and the new version both have approximately 450 pages. My website developer was careful to implement 301 redirects. Monitoring Google Webmaster tools it shows that Google has picked up a quantity of duplicate content. More than 950 pages or shown in their index while my site only has 450 pages. There are also certain pages which require canonical which tags my developer is in the process of implementing. The relaunch was July 10. My developer is of the opinion that this fluctuation in ranking is normal and that it will take Google about one month to reindex the new site and remove the old pages from the directory. Is this accurate? Anyone have any ideas on why my site has tanked in Google's search results? Thank you very much. Sincerely,
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan Rosinsky0 -
Redesigning a really old Website with old-fashioned permalinks
Hey SEO-Pros, I'm currently redesigning a quite old website, with the following URL structure: TLD/category/category.php?interview_id=819 The new Version will be a little more SEO-friendly: TLD/interviews/name-of-interview/ I know I have to do a 301-Redirect for all the old URLs to the new ones in order to keep the (until now pretty good) Google Ranking. If the rankings drop after the redesign has been done, I'll surely get killed 😉 So, Is there any easy way of creating these 301-Redirects (must be thousands of URLs...)? Best Regards guys and thanks for your help!
Web Design | | dominator0 -
Wordpress Design Pricing
Why on earth did you say you could get a quality template designed and coded for a few hundred bucks? Im a professional designer, I expect to make 75 an hour which is actually low. And you think I should be able to design and code a high quality wordpress site in a few hours. You are killing my business and encouraging people to hire low quality developers or take work out of America. Im very offended by your comments. Why dont you try living on 5 bucks an hour !! You just spit in the face of all good designers.
Web Design | | compasslocal0
