How to Implement Massive SEO Modifications
-
Hi everyone,
I'm implementing some fairly significant changes on a clients website and wanted to know if it was better to implement all the changes at once or if I should implement the changes gradually.
The changes are:
1. Amended information architecture
2. Completely new URL's
3. New meta data and some new on page content
4. Meta robots 'no index, follow' approximately 90% of the site
Can I make all these changes in one go (that would be my preference), or should I gradually implement? What are the risks?
Many thanks
James
-
Hi Joe,
Thanks for the response. Having had a variety of different opinions, and still not being 100% on the right answer, I spent a LOT of time crawling through SEOmoz Q&A:
Takeaways from my digging around are:
- Changes to title tags and URL's should be implemented separately. As you state above, reason for this is so that you can pinpoint problems if they arise (see point 3 of the answer) http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/49136/revising-urls
- Title tag changes should also be implemented in stages. Homepage, top 50 pages, everything else (again, see point 3 of the answer): http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/39946/title-tags-global-changes. (As an interesting aside, Dr Pete clearly states that when making sitewide changes, dont make more than one set of changes per page, it could cause an over-optimisation penalty)
- URL structure changes should be implemented all in one go: http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/45183/update-url-structure (this link is an amazing guide from everett sizemore on exactly how to implement URL changes, recommended reading!)
I appreciate there's no right and wrong answer, but I think that with the above in mind, the approach I'm going to take to these changes is a scientific one. Make a change, assess results, move forward.
1. Implement title tag changes in stages (monitoring site performance at every stage). Homepage/Category Pages/Everything else.
2.Add new on page content.
3. Add new information architecture (couple of new categories- nothing significant)
4. Implement URL changes through 301 redirects all in one go. Keep old site XML sitemap in place. Once site has been crawled (and new pages found) move to new sitemap and update internal links
4. Implement meta robots 'noindex, follow' to various sections of the site. Not all in one go, but section by section, monitoring results and then moving on if no issues arise
Would be interested to know what you think of that as a plan? Also, need to send out love to Dr Pete and Everett Sizemore for their Q&A answers!
James
-
#2 - completely new url's says it all for me. The others are all subs of that change. If possible you need to address these changes in some form of 301 redirect so that the spiders can follow your changes. update the .htaccess file or even create static php redirect headers or similar if you have to. This should prevent the search engines from reporting the dreaded 404 and getting the page dumped.
#4 - The no-index is not something you have to worry about as you are removing pages from the SERPs, not trying to get them ranked. Any page that is getting no-index is out of the SEO equation at this point.
#3 - this will improve rankings/search-ability so you are not looking at seeing a negative effect here. Updates on these pages, if done correctly, generally have favorable results and at the worst have 'no change' in the SERPs
#1 - I would need to know more detail on this one, but the new architecture will probably be reflected in #2's urls so if that it solved, so is number 1. Again, a more clear, easily accessible architecture hopefully allows the spiders to effectively categorize the sections of your site. The new IA will probably be more pleasing to users which will have its own benefits as well.
---- And the final vote... All at once, just address the 404's and you should be ok
-
NoIndex 90% of a site? Interested to hear why that makes sense in any situation. Maybe only implement have of those noindex tags at first to see if you get the desired result.
As for the title, meta and content, all at once is fine. Hopefully your new stuff is better than the old! Best of luck!
-
I came here to tell him to do the exact opposite! I was going to suggest doing one change at a time to measure and or A/B test results to make sure maximum benefit of each was given. After reading your response and his issues, i've changed my opinion and agree with you that its probably best to do all of these at once in one MAJOR revision and then tweak after that.
-
Considering how massive the changes are, I'd say it's best to do them all at once. This will let you start rebuilding as soon as possible. Making one big change and then waiting to start ranking again, followed by another big change that could drop them out of the rankings again would likely cause a longer period of your client not getting traffic. I wouldn't say that the on-page and metadata changes need to be made at the same time, if there are limited resources.
One problem with doing this all at once is that it will be more difficulty to evaluate the effect of each change. This might not be a huge deal to you, but sometimes it is nice to know what return came from each change.
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
-
Unique content for international SEO?
Hi Guys, We have a e-commerce store on generic top-level domain which has 1000s of products in US. We are looking to expand to aus, uk and canda using subfolders. We are going to implement hreflang tags. I was told by our SEO agency we need to make all the content between each page unique. This should be fine for cateogry/product listing pages. But they said we need to make content unique on product pages. If we have 1000 products, thats 4000 pages, which is a big job in terms of creating content. Is this necessary? What is the correct way to approach this, won't the hreflang tag be sufficent to prevent any duplicate content issues with product pages? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | geekyseotools0 -
Regarding SEO Structured Data
1. Should we add organization schema on all pages of the website OR just homepage? 2. What is the best practice for catalog page schema as every website is following a different pattern?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rajesh.Prajapati1 -
SEO question
Hi there! I'm the SEO manager for 5 Star Loans. I have 2 city pages running. We are running our business in 2 locations: Berkeley, CA & San Jose, CA. For those offices we've created 2 google listings with separate gmail accounts. Berkeley (http://5starloans.com/berkeley/) ranks well in Berkeley in Gmaps and it shows on first page in organic results. However the second city page San Jose (http://5starloans.com/san-jose/) doesn't show in the Gmaps local pack results and also doesn't rank well in organic results. Both of them have authentic backlinks and reviews. It has been a year already and it's high time we knew the problem 🙂 any comment would be helpful. thanks a lot
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moonalev0 -
Web domain hurt seo?
does having the "web" prefix in the domain name, such as in web.pennies.com/copper hurt SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | josh1230 -
How can we improve the seo on our site?
Hello everyone. I have been reading through this site for a while and tried to put everything together that I have learned so far. Would any of you mind looking at our site and providing any pointers or areas we can still improve on or areas I completely missed. I appreciate any feedback you can give! Our site is faithology.com Thanks again! Brandon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BMPIRE0 -
Mobile SEO
Hi there, My website when searching via mobile is now showing the mobile version of the site in SERPs, well for quite sometime now to be honest, anyway the ranking in mobile are no different to what they are on desktop, is there actually anything I can do to influence my mobile SERPs? 9 times out of 10 it's desktop websites that are ranking about me in mobile search. Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Pagination & SEO
I have the WP-Pagination plugin and I am wondering how to handle duplicate content issues and what's best for SEO. My developer initially downloaded the plugin to speed up loading for the home page. Now my home page has 21 pages of paginated content. But the pagination continues with each of my categories as well. Should I be placing a canonical reference to my home page, or category main page? My site name is gracessweetlife (dot) com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gracessweetlife0 -
Multiple blogs for seo
I have signed up for some rather expensive lawyer directories that have very high domain PR, 's of 6 or 7 . Some of these allow you to make blog posts or articles on their site which should be good for SEO because of the high domain PR. I understand that if I do a lot of posts on one of these blogs with links back to my site, I should rapidly reach the point of diminishing returns because they are all coming from the same domain. Therefore, I plan to mix up my blo posts betwee several of these sites and also rewrite them and post them on my own site's blog. My question is this, if I post on any of these sites and I link back to internal pages of my site, and not to the home page, does this offset the "diminishing returns" factor? Paul
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | diogenes0