Site Redesign - Regaining Rankings
-
We just finished designing a whole new site that will hopefully convert better than our previous site and we are currently coding it. We are hoping to get the site out in the next month or two (or three!). We want to know what to expect in regard to our sales from SEO.
If you successfully launched a site redesign and your conversion rate improved, can you answer this question? How long will it take for my rankings to regain their initial ranking and then hopefully rank even higher?
-
I really liked it. It worked great for the company where I worked previously as an in-house SEO. We would be using it where I am now for a new niche business we built, however, Volusion's platform, at this time, is not capable of accurately calculating sales tax. If Congress passes the Main Street tax for Web site e-commerce, Volusion's platform will need to catch up and be capable of calculating sales taz accurately across all 50 states, or their business will be in trouble.
For the niche site here, we selected 3dcart because it integrates with Avalara Avatax, which is a great (but fairly pricey) service that automatically and accuralte calculates sales tax for difficult states like California and Washington.
However, 3dcart has some serious limitations and the backend is not nealy as intuitive as Volusion's. Merchandising on 3dcart, particularly bundled products is pretty much a messy nightmare. Volusion is much nicer. Volusion also has a nicer way of organizing all the backend content, including design elements. 3dcart is very disjunct in terms of how design elements are orgnized for editing in the back end.
As far as SEO goes, I think they are both fine. Perhaps 3DCart might have a tiny bit of an edge because it does allow you the ability to 100% customize your URLs.
Hope that's good food for thought!
Dana
-
Now that you have been on Volusion for a bit - what are your thoughts? - I know this is off topic but I have been considering trying it out...
-
I agree with Billy completely and I have also been in a scenario where a complete platform change and redesign took place. In our case, we did see a drastic reduction in traffic and rankings, but this was due to developers not properly handling 301-redirects. Once those were set in place it took about 6 weeks to recover. After that the site converted twice as well as the old one and traffic increased about 25%. Rankings improved astronomically. Just for reference we moved from BV4 (in-house) to Volusion (hosted).
Good luck! I hope it goes swimmingly!
Dana
-
We have completed redesigns like what you have described (in your responses as well as your original post) and for one in particular - even with far better optimization in place after the redesign we had some rankings drop for a couple of weeks before rankings not only returned but improved over what they had been. It was like the redesign was so drastic that Google pushed us back just to see what was going on - although I chalked it up to being the amount of time it probably took for all of the redirects to be recognized...
-
Your dead right on that! We are basically switching everything. We currently use a custom php shopping cart and we are switching to magento. Like I replied to EGOL we are creating an entire new navigation with many new urls and and entirely new funnel from entry through checkout.
This is our current site http://www.plasticplace.net/
This is our future home page: http://i.imgur.com/zK0lUEq.jpg
-
Not a redesign, pretty much a huge transition. As EGOL mentioned, you will need redirects to pass on the link juice for EVERY SINGLE PAGE.
And the power of each individual page will change as well. Example your link juice was 100 and spread to 50 pages. Your new site will have 100 juice and spread to 100 pages.
-
We are changing the site from .net to .com. Will that change the picture?
Oh.... be careful, you are changing the URL's. If doing that then you need 301 redirects.
We are creating an entire new navigation...
OK... and you will be changing the flow of power through your site and possibly the anchor text... I hope that you are using spiderable ways to link these pages.
If you don't understand the answers you are getting then I highly recommend getting an experienced person to check your work - especially if this is an important site that supports and business and its payroll.
-
We are creating an entire new navigation with many new urls and and entirely new funnel from entry through checkout.
We did a lot of on page optimization in the past few months and we are using those urls for our future site but there are many more that we will continue to optimize.
Our goal in doing this site renovation is for increased conversion rate and easier navigation.
We are changing the site from .net to .com. Will that change the picture?
-
Hi Michael,
It sounds to me that perhaps this might be more than just a redesign. Are you changing the platform the site is on? Let me know and I will answer in more detail.
Dana
-
Site design change right? If the designer is just going in and moving graphics around and such..it should not affect rankings at all.
EGOL is referring to wireframing and internal linking structure where a designer kills off a page and doesn't do redirects or ends up creating tons of 404s for ya.
-
If you are simply changing the "template" of the site the rankings should not fall. Unless you do sin such as changing the URLs or changing the on-page optimization or internal link structure.
If you are redesigning the site one of your goals should be making improvements in the rankings. If you are doing this in fear of loss then maybe you should have someone advising you with the project.
-
A site change won't cause any drop in rankings??
-
If your designer carefully preserves the on-page optimization and your internal link structure then your rankings should not go down.
If your designer does not understand how to preserve the on-page / link structure and knows that changing the URLs is a problem then you need a different designer.
-
Your rankings will not largely be affected by simply redesigning a site.
Things you have to consider:
-Content: Are you optimizing every page with relevant and search engine friendly content.
-Usability: Increasing user experience less bounce/exit.
-Site speed: Is your page loading quick enough, are there pages that hang?
Usually a good redesign doesn't result in a dramatic increase in your rankings..perhaps a small-med 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
-
Does my "spam" site affect my other sites on the same IP?
I have a link directory called Liberty Resource Directory. It's the main site on my dedicated IP, all my other sites are Addon domains on top of it. While exploring the new MOZ spam ranking I saw that LRD (Liberty Resource Directory) has a spam score of 9/17 and that Google penalizes 71% of sites with a similar score. Fair enough, thin content, bunch of follow links (there's over 2,000 links by now), no problem. That site isn't for Google, it's for me. Question, does that site (and linking to my own sites on it) negatively affect my other sites on the same IP? If so, by how much? Does a simple noindex fix that potential issues? Bonus: How does one go about going through hundreds of pages with thousands of links, built with raw, plain text HTML to change things to nofollow? =/
Technical SEO | | eglove0 -
Partner Sites
Hi All, Within our company we have a media group that publishes magazines and videos, the sites have footers that link to our shopping site, one of them has 118,459 links to one URL, domain authority 23, and the other 17,726 to seven URLs, domain authority 52, (there are some articles which link organically). My question is are these links because they're from identifiable companies with the same ownership worth keeping or are they detrimental? The site being linked to has a DA of 39 Cheers Stew
Technical SEO | | StewMcG0 -
Which carries more weight Google page rank or Alexa Rank?
And how come do I see websites with Google PR of Zero and Alexa Page Rank in the top Thousands rank?
Technical SEO | | sherohass0 -
Can we use our existing site content on new site?
We added 1000s of pages unique content on our site and soon after google release penguin and we loose our ranking for major keywords and after months of efforts we decided to start a new site. If we use all the existing site content on new domain does google going to penalized the site for duplicate content or it will be treated as unique? Thanks
Technical SEO | | mozfreak0 -
Keyword ranking not moving
Hello, We have a very important keyword for our website (www.decorplanet.com) that hasn't moved in any direction in over a year. The keyword is "bathroom vanities". Our current SEO company has told us that the previous company has "over- optimized/linked" for this particular keyword and now Google is penalizing us for this. They told us that we need to leave it alone for a while and concentrate on other keywords and this one should naturally come back up (I should mention that at some point, we were much higher than where we are right now for that particular keyword). Many of our other high-profile keywords have been moving nicely to the first page. Keywords like "modern bathroom vanities", "antique bathroom vanities", "contemporary bathroom vanities", but the one that we really want ("bathroom vanities") hasn't budged at all. Does anyone have any thoughts on this. Is it possible that Google put us in some sort of a "sand-box" - I mean we are on page 2 so it doesn't sound like that's the case. It's just very bizarre that we can't seem to do anything with this keyword. Really appreciate any thoughts or input on this.
Technical SEO | | steven11330 -
Time on site
From what I understand, if you search for a keyword say "blue widgets" and you click on a result, and then spend 10 seconds there, and go back to google and click on a different result google will track that first result as being not very relevant. What I don't understand is what happens when (and this happens all the time, i did it today) you click on a result go to that page, find it (not?) relevant and then get distracted, phone call, or someone calls you into another room in the office. You end up accidentally leaving the tab open all day long, and never go back to the google search. So your time on site to google is what? infinity? there must be an upper cap here? at some point they must say, ok, the user is gone, time on site = our maximum = 5 minutes?!? Get me? any insight?
Technical SEO | | adriandg0 -
Is it a good idea to make 301 from a site which you know google has banned certain keywords for to a new site with similar content
Here is a short question re. 301. I read Dovers article on how to move an old domain to a new one. Say you have been a little inexperienced regarding linkbuilding and used some cheap service in the past and you have steadily seen that certain keywords have been depreciating in the SERP - however the PR is still 3 for the domain - now the qustion is should you rediect with a 301 in .htaccess to a new domain when you know that google does not like certain keywords with respect to the old site. Will the doom and gloom carry over to the new site?
Technical SEO | | Kofoed0 -
Replacing a site map
We are in the process of changing our folder/url structure. Currently we have about 5 sitemaps submitted to Google. How is it best to deal with these site maps in terms of either (a) replacing the old URLs with the new ones in the site map and (b) what affect should we have if we removed the site map submission from the Google Webmaster Tools console. Basically we have in the region of 20,000 urls to redirect to the new format, and to update in the site map.
Technical SEO | | NeilTompkins0