How to change a site without loosing ranking .
-
How to change a site without loosing ranking .I have a WP site for my own company .locally i have good ranking for few keywords .but I decided to change site theme and improve site contents further .but still i am not sure how to change these thing and doing without loosing ranking .expert advices welcome .
-
Hi Chandana
There are a few major things to consider when updating the site:
**Keep same URLs **
Maybe the single most important factor is to not change allready ranking URLs. I do understand that changing the look of the site might require this, but you should at least do your absolute best not to change them. Also if you have a mutlilevel structure such as www.example.com/category/page be very careful changing the category since that will mean you also change all subpages.
I would check pagerank and incoming traffic from search for each of the pages, then make a note on what pages are most important. You can use www.opensiteexplorer.org and Google Analytics for this.
301 redirects
If you have to change your URL structure then make sure you do proper 301 redirects to the new URLs. This will not prevent you from loosing ranking on the page but will help you recover faster.
On-page SEO
Make sure your new site is optimized as far as possible for on-page SEO. Before you move, test the old page, then make sure the new page is atleast as good. Maybe also a good idea to look at headings and try to follow the same structure. Use the quite excellent tool from SEOMoz for this. You should find it here: http://www.seomoz.org/tools
Internal Link structure
This is not all that easy but try to look at how your internal link structure looks at the old site and move this to the new site. What footer links you got? What keywords you use in the links? What menus you use? If your new site is going for a dropdown menu this typically adds a massive amount of links to your site. This might be important.
Be careful
When making new sites its easy to get too busy designing and building the new site. Just play it cool and make sure not to make any mistakes such as leaving a no index tag or forgetting to remove a default robots.txt. Take an extra day to go through it all.
Spot mistakes as quick as you can
Make sure to use Google Webmastertools and Analytics to spot any problems and correct them as fast as you can.
Hope these simple tips helps you get going with your move.
Good luck and hope your new site turns out well.
Fredrik
-
If you going to change contents it doesn't matter if it's old or new theme, the result will be the same. It is most important that you stick to one main rule. Good and attractive content for your visitors. Not from expert point of view but I would do that if I'm in the same situation.
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
-
301 redirecting a site that currently links to the target site
I have a personal blog that has a good amount of back links pointing at it from high quality relevant authoritative sites in my niche. I also run a company in the same niche. I link to a page on the company site from the personal blog article that has bunch of relevant links pointing at it (as it's highly relevant to the content on the personal blog). Overview: Relevant personal blog post has a bunch of relevant external links pointing at it (completely organic). Relevant personal blog post then links (externally) to relevant company site page and is helping that page rank. Question: If I do the work to 301 the personal blog to the company site, and then link internally from the blog page to the other relevant company page, will this kill that back link or will the internal link help as much as the current external link does currently? **For clarity: ** External sites => External blog => External link to company page VS External sites => External blog 301 => Blog page (now on company blog) => Internal link to target page I would love to hear from anyone that has performed this in the past 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Keyword_NotProvided0 -
Launching a new website. Old inherited site cannot be saved after lifted penalty. When should we kill the old site and how?
Background Information A website that we inherited was severely penalized and after the penalty was revoked the site still never resurfaced in rankings or traffic. Although a dramatic action, we have decided to launch a completely new version of the website. Everything will be new including the imagery, branding, content, domain name, hosting company, registrar account, google analytics account, etc. Our question is when do we pull the plug on the old site and how do we go about doing it? We had heard advice that we should make sure we run both sites at the same time for 3 months, then deindex the old site using a noindex meta robots tag.We are cautious because we don't want the old website to be associated in any way, shape or form with the new website. We will purposely not be 301 redirecting any URLs from the old website to the new. What would you do if you were in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | peteboyd0 -
How can I rank a national site for local terms
Hi All I have a website that covers all parts of the UK and I wish to be found for terms such as "car for sale London" "car for sale Manchester" and so on. In the past I have created separate landing pages for each town and city but with the quality score of a page becoming more of a ranking factor it is hard to make 300 + town pages interesting and useful. Is it best practice to do what I am doing and improve the quality of each of the pages or would I be better off removing the old pages and using some other technique to rank for the local searches? Thanks for your help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MotoringSEO0 -
Is it possible to lose rank because my site's IP changed?
I manage a site on the 3dCart e-commerce platform. I recently updated the SSL certificate. Today, when I tried to log-in via FTP, I couldn't connect. The reason I couldn't connect was because my IP had changed. Last week the site experienced almost across the board rankings drops on lmost every important keyword. Not gigantic drops, a lot just lost 2-4 postiions, but that's a lot when you were #2 and you drop to #4 or # 6. Initially I thought it was because I was attempting to markup my product pages using structured data following guidelines from schema.org. I am not a coder so it was a real struggle, especially trying to navigate 3dCart's listing templates. I thought the rankings drops were Google slapping me for bad code, but now I wonder....could I really have dropped down because of that IP address change? Does anyone have a take on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Advice on Getting this site ranking?
Hi there I'm looking to optimise this site for SEO -> Gets about 3,000 visits per day but all from branded searches. Gets virtually no 'keyword searches' It's just a landing page at the moment. Would you recommend I integrate a blog with it, so we can start targeting more long tail keywords (free football game etc) Any thoughts/advice appreciated 🙂 Thanks Howard
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HowardK0 -
Why our site dropped in rank for a main keyword
Hello, Our site nlpca(dot)com dropped in rank for a few terms, including the main term "NLP". Could you look at our site and tell us what might be the cause? Thank you so much, Bob
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Why did my rankings drop?
Hi all, In July I started to re-energise my link building efforts by getting a proper campaign together to build links. Despite building about 20 new links my traffic has actually fallen. Here a a breakdown of what happen: 1)Late June I noticed my toolbar page rank up at about PR4 which, despite only being a small part of the algo, was nice to see. Early July I started my link building campaign by getting together a massive list of potential link partners by using Open Site Explorer on my competitors sites. 3)Because I'm a bit pressed for time I decided to go for the easier links first. I sorted my link list by Domain Authority and started to list on high DA directories used by my competitors. I listed on about 20 of these directories. I also livened up an old links page I'd previously hidden from the SE's because I was planning to do a bit of Link exchanging too. A few days after I started building links from these directories I noticed my traffic start to drop off gradually. I also noticed the toolbar PR go down to PR3. I decided to stop at 20 submissions because it looked like this was effecting traffic. I also removed the links page I'd livened up which produced a temporary improvement in traffic but it's since gone on to get a bit worse. Traffic is now down by about 10% on when I started buying submissions to directories. I must add that during this period we have also been taking on new clients which, as a a real estate listing site, means we put loads of content on our site for the client. That content is also on the clients website and on other competitors sites. So there would be lot's of a content that appears elsewhere on the net. Not really sure which of the two has caused the problem and not really sure how to progress. Do I remove the links on the directories? Do I wait for this newly added content to bed down so that new fresh can take it's place in our results which we rank from? Any help would be appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0 -
An Infrastructure Change for a Large eCommerce Site - Any advice?
Hello Mozers, We're currently under going quite a large infrastructure change to our website and I wouldn't to hear your thoughts on the type of things we should be careful of. We currently have close to 4,000 individual products each with their own page. The seo work is then driven behind certain pages which house a catalog display of groups of products. The groups are done by style. An example is we have a page called "Style A" which displays 8 different colours of style A. We then seo the style A page and the individual items received minimal seo work. The change would involve having one individual product page for each style but on that page the user would have the ability to purchase the different colours/variations via menus. This will result in approximately a %70 reduction in the size of our site (as several products will no longer be published) The things we are currently concerned with are: 1. The lose of equity to those unwanted 'style A' pages - I think a series of careful planned 301s will be the solution. 2. Possible loss of long tail traffic to the individual products which might not be caught by one individual page per style. 3. Internal link structure will need to be monitored to make sure that we're still highlight the most important pages as well, important. Sorry for the long post, it's a difficult change to explain without revealing the clients name - any other things we should be thinking about would be greatly appreciated! Thanks Nigel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NigelJ0