What are the best practices with website redesign & redirects?
-
I have a website that is not very pretty but has great rankings. I want to redesign the website and loose as little rankings as possible and still clean up the navigation. What are the best practices? Thanks in advance.
-
Hi there
Here are some great resources:
Web Fundamentals (Google)
Multi Design Layouts (Google)
The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Web Design & Development (Moz)
Designing for SEO (Moz)
Information Architecture for SEO (Moz)
The Process of Web Design: From Discovery to Prototype (Moz)I would also make sure that you focus on user experience not just from the design aspect, but the content aspect as well. Here's another great resource on that.
When you are ready to move your site, make sure you review this resource from Google, as well as this migration guide from Moz.
All of the above should help you get started - make sure that you review with your web development team and review the following on your current site:
- All KPIs that matter most to your visibility / performance
- Your site's goals over time
- Google Search Console performance over time (impressions / rankings)
- Take a look at your competitors
- Check your on-site SEO
- Check your backlinks
- Check your content
- Check your information architecture
- Learn more about your audience
- Are you capturing your audience at the right points? Do you have content to do so?
- Are you doing everything you can do develop your brand(s) right now?
Sometimes it may be a matter of a redesign and not a new site overall. There's a great Whiteboard Friday that touches on elements of this topic called Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands?
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Need help with best practices on eliminating old thin content blogs.
We have about 100 really old blog posts that are nothing more than a short trip review w/ images. Consequently these pages are poor quality. Would best practices be to combine into one "review page" per trip, reducing from 100 to about 10 better pages and implement redirects? Or is having more pages better with less redirects? We only have about 700 pages total. Thanks for any input!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KarenElaine0 -
VTEX Infinite Scroll Design: What is On-Page SEO Best Practice?
We are migrating to the VTEX E Commerce platform and it is built on javascript, so there are no <a>tags to link product pages together when there is a long list of products. According to the Google Search Console Help document, "Google can follow links only if they are an</a> <a>tag with an href attribute." - Google Search Console Help document </a>http://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9112205. So, if there a 1000 products, javascript just executes to deliver more content in order to browse through the entire product list. The problem is there is no actual link for crawlers to follow. Has anyone implemented a solution to this or a similar problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ggarciabisco0 -
What's the best way to A/B test new version of your website having different URL structure?
Hi Mozzers, Hope you're doing good. Well, we have a website, up and running for a decent tenure with millions of pages indexed in search engines. We're planning to go live with a new version of it i.e a new experience for our users, some changes in site architecture which includes change in URL structure for existing URLs and introduction of some new URLs as well. Now, my question is, what's the best way to do a A/B test with the new version? We can't launch it for a part of users (say, we'll make it live for 50% of the users, an remaining 50% of the users will see old/existing site only) because the URL structure is changed now and bots will get confused if they start landing on different versions. Will this work if I reduce crawl rate to ZERO during this A/B tenure? How will this impact us from SEO perspective? How will those old to new 301 URL redirects will affect our users? Have you ever faced/handled this kind of scenario? If yes, please share how you handled this along with the impact. If this is something new to you, would love to know your recommendations before taking the final call on this. Note: We're taking care of all existing URLs, properly 301 redirecting them to their newer versions but there are some new URLs which are supported only on newer version (architectural changes I mentioned above), and these URLs aren't backward compatible, can't redirect them to a valid URL on old version.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
Stolen website content
Hello, recently we had a lot of content written for our new website. Unfortunately me and my partner have went separate ways, and he has used all my unique content on his own website. All our product descriptions, about us etc, he simply changed the name of the company. He has agreed to take the content down, so that i can now put this content on our new website which is currently being designed. Will google see this as duplicate content as it has been on a website before? Even though the content has been removed from the original website. I was worried as the content is no longer "fresh" so to speak. Can any one help me with this,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexogilvie0 -
Best practice for duplicate website content: same root domain name but different extension
Hi there I have a new client who has two websites: http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.co.nz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | turnbullholdingsltd
http://www.bayofislandsteambuilding.org.nz They are the same in every regard apart from the domain extension (.co.nz & .org.nz) which is likely to be causing them issues with Google ranking given the huge amount of duplicate content. What is the best practice approach to fixing this? Normally, if I was starting from scratch, I would set one of the extensions as an alias which redirects to the main domain. Thanks in advance. Laurie0 -
Need to know best practices of Search Engine Optimization 2013
I want to know best practices of Search Engine Optimization 2013 and also need best possible sources. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GM0070 -
Create a link or redirect?
We have 60 demo movie pages on our site. We no longer link to these movie pages internally, because they are outdated; however, a lot of our partner companies are still linking to these pages. Some of these pages will have 10-15 linking root domains and a page authority of 30+... so pretty decent authority. These pages only include a movie on the pages, no links. I am trying to pass some of the link juice from these pages to other pages on our site. I am wondering if I should: A)Include transcripts on these pages, then link back to our current product page or solution pages? B)Set up redirects from these pages to a product or solution page? C)Set up a redirect to our homepage? Any advice? Thanks, Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mike.Goracke0 -
Regional websites
Hi, I run 4 websites London, New York, Singapore and Dubai. Same company but some of our products are different in each region. Each domain is registered in the relevant region and I have google webmaster tools set so they know the location of each website. The problem is that our Dubai and US websites are appearing higher that the UK website in google.co.uk organic. Does anyone have any ideas why? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | markc-1971830