Website Redesign - Will it hurt SERP?
-
Hi - I am planning to redesign my blog and I was wondering if this will affect my rankings?
The new website template (custom designed) is much more user and seo friendly. The content, url structure, internal linking structure, meta tags, and site structure will remain exactly the same, but the visual design will be different (new sidebar widgets, and slightly different layout on inner pages).
The current website is ranking very well (mostly top 5), has a healthy backlink profile, strong social media presence, and great traffic.
I have heard that switching to a new template will dramatically hurt the rankings. Is this true? Are there any exceptions? Any ways I can prevent the rankings from dropping?
Would really appreciate your input. Thanks in advance.
Howard
-
Matthew, much appreciated.
Thankfully I don't need to worry about redirects since it's just a transition to a new template. About 90% of the other elements will remain intact.
Checking webmaster tools after the transition sounds really helpful.
ps. Thanks to everyone for your great responses!
-
Thanks for the detailed answer. This, in itself, could make a great article
After reviewing the items you mentioned, I actually realized some of the things I had neglected.
Apparently after transferring all the content to the demo website, some of the elements had changed, including: date of the posts, H tags, Authors, and few of the meta tags. So glad I caught your response in time to fix those issues.
For the most part, the new site is an improved version of the current site so if the rankings drop, I'll be surprised.
After I make the transition, I'll let you know the results. Hopefully this could make a good case scenario for the community.
Thanks again!
Howard
-
I think you have a good approach to this, and so, all things being the same, a refresh of the site should not hurt.
You mention that "content, url structure, internal linking structure" will all remain the same - if this is true and you keep everything in this bracket 'as-is' then you should be fine.
The most common reason rankings are lost when implementing a new site is re-directs, or the lack a redirect strategy to be more clear.
As your site structure / url structure is going to remain in-tack, then you wont really need to consider mass redirects.
However, here is what I would do just in case:
Before Launch:
Create a report of top linked to pages using Open Site Explore
Create a report of top content from the last few months from Google Analytics
Map all the URLs from the current site, use screaming from or something
After Launch:
Submit XML sitemap to webmaster tool
Review and improve on-page content
Monitor traffic in Google analytics, view top content for the period after launch and compare to the report you created prior to launch
Monitor and fix crawl errors in webmaster tools if any
Attract new links
Submit new XML sitemap (two weeks post launch)
Keep developing great content
-
keep it simple. The work and how much your rankings will change (usually just temporary) will be dependent on what you focus to work on and how big the site is
Just do things one at a time.
- Make sure you fix all errors ASAP (images, internal links etc)
- Redirect the old urls to the new urls
- Make sure the speed of loading is the same of faster.
- Basically, just do things quickly and optimise.
Run screaming frog after and fix all the remaining errors. Youll probably see more errors in webmaster tools once your site gets recrawled but those will probably be easy fixes.
Remember, just focus and get it done ASAP and youll be fine.
-
This is a tough question to answer. Technically yes, your SERPs will probably change. Hurt? That's hard to say.
I'm going to list a few reasons your SERs may change. I don't want to argue with everyone about which factors matter, etc. but these are some potential reasons your rankings may change (and other SEOs may disagree on which of these actually matter. I'm including them for the sake of completeness and to show that there are MANY reasons a site change will bounce your rankings.)
These are just some things that may change:
1) Site speed. You could be faster (better design, fewer big images) or you could be slower (that would hurt your rankings.)
2) Site structure. If you had a Wordpress site for instance that used to list all your post titles as H2 and your subheadings as H3 and now all your titles are H3, that is likely to at least somewhat affect your structure and yes, you may see some SERP changes.
3) Code / text ratio/density whatever you want to call it. Most SEOs will tell you very straightforwardly that "keyword density" is dead. And yet we've tested that this is a moderation thing. If you have a word too many times, you get penalized. Too few and it's just assumed to be one word among many, not a topic. The hint is to fall somewhere between say oh I dunno, 2 and 30 for most pages, right? Now, I've done a test that suggested if the word was on the page say 15 times and that was 2% of the whole page text, it wouldn't be penalized. Same word, same 15 times, and reduce the extraneous code so it's 10%? Gets penalized every time. So while on page keyword density is dead, MY (albeit flawed) study told me that changing code tremendously could affect your keywords if you tend to be on the higher (penalty) end.
**4) Validation. **Again, I'm being controversial and I understand many SEOs disagree with this one. However, you're asking what "may" hurt - and if your site was 100% valid before (or close) and it has a lot of errors now, that would (in my opinion) affect your SEO.
5) Page Age. Hurt or help - it's hard to say. Google normally prefers fresh content so you may actually see some improvements on this. However, when Google has "seasoned in" your pages and you change them, they aren't always 100% awesome at getting your rank exactly the same after any sort of change or even date update. (We had a news site for awhile that had ranking issues because older articles would get their "last edited" date updated frequently and Google would often drop older, successful URLs back 3-4 pages when we updated. It made no sense but ... ya, Google.)
6) Page layout. Google quality guideliens say that "the page layout on the highest quality pages makes the main content immediately visible." If your update makes more or less content show up "above the fold" as it were, you may see SERP changes for better or worse.
7) Breadcrumbs and Navigation. If your old theme had poor (or amazing) navigation and the new one is opposite, you could see SERP movement for sure. Google loves its breadcrumbs. If you had them and removed them, you could fall a bit. If you didn't have them and you do now, you could rise. Breadcrumbs signal good user experience and Google rewards that.
Mobile optimization. If the old site wasn't responsive/mobile friendly and the new one is, that could affect your mobile SERPs (and possibly your desktop ones ... depending on how its implemented.)
9) Analytics. I've posited before that Google must use some data from Analytics - time on site, pages per visit, bounce rate, etc. .They seem to correlate VERY strongly with my "most visited pages" and those with the highest rank. I would suggest that if your user experience dramatically improves, your SERPs may as well.
10) Schema. You said the structure is essentially remaining the same but if the new one allows for review stars, authorshop markup, photo schema or whatnot, that could improve SERP position.
-
Google will have to spider the site before any loss in rankings due to design, right? So, if there is a drop in rankings, it won't necessarily be recovered in a re-index.
But, so long as there are no errors and the site remains the same structurally and content wise, there shouldn't necessarily be any issue. Even if there are no errors with the new theme as far as SEO goes, if the new design affects the load speed, this could affect the ranking of your page.
-
That is only truth if the new theme that you are going to use has errors. If it has been SEO'ed and all the content will be the same, you may some rankings decline until Google spiders the new site and re index it. But that shouldn't take very long.
You need to think on the users first, will the users love the new site? If they will, then Google will follow, don't worry about that.
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
-
Multiple redirects hurt?
In the process of website migrations and redesign, we create & replace new pages which will lead to multiple redirects unknowingly. Like: page A to page B & page B to page C. Will these kind of multiple redirects hurt? I would be happy to hear what happens with WordPress with this scenario in particular.
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
SEO Tips for Affiliate Website
Hi all , I would just like to have an expert Opinion on SEO for Affiliate Website . Basically if I list all Third party products (Amazon/Affilate Window etc ) on my website and then the customer will be redirected to the Affiliates website to make a Purchase will there be an issue with SEO (Lots of Outgoing Url's) and Will the website not rank for Important keywords or will it be hit by any penalty ? I heard it's not good for SEO , any work around this ? If this is case How come cashback Sites rank well with no issues , although the concept is basically the same ? Any Tips or Advice appreciated as how to get this done safe . My Preferred Option would be with Magento Shopping Cart or second option would be with Wordpress Cart only in case this provides some SEO benefits over Magento by some plugins .
Web Design | | Aus0070 -
Certain PHP Pages Not Showing In SERPs
Hi all, You've all been so helpful so far, I'm hoping you can help me with our trickiest SEO question yet. Last year we migrated 7 sites into one, going from flat html to Joomla. This went fine and although we saw a slight drop in traffic, it wasn't too bad. Now however traffic has started to drop and we've been able to hone it down into a certain area of our website. Each of the 7 sites had their own page with some php code that was fed products. These products were updated everyday and were are second most popular page on the sites aprt from the home page. These pages were found in Google no problem and were an essential resource for our site. What we have found is these pages cannot be found at all, unless you type the full business name and product. If you just type the product and the location our customer is based in, we're no where, using the Moz tools it says we're not in the top 50 results. This is a bit of a shock since we used to be at least on the first page, usually quite high up. I'm a little stumped as SEO wise these pages are technically better. They offer the same functionality but in a much more SEO friendly way. I've asked our developer to check: Nothing is being blocked in robots.txt
Web Design | | HB17
The pages are being indexed
There's no strange code errors Essentially the pages can't be found even if we type the full title, for example 'customer's products in their town' to be found we have to type 'customer's products in their town and their full business name'. The top third of the page is just html text, the bottom like I mentioned is PHP and is fed data from a database which is refreshed each morning. I know our developer did some rel conical work but has assured me that's all working fine. While I know it's a new website, we've owned the domain for a while so our domain authority isn't brand new and 0, we also have pages with worse page authority that show up on page 1 no problem, so I'm leaning towards something else might not be right. Can anyone help me figure out why these pages are being indexed but not even found? Thanks!0 -
SEO Audit for site redesign
I'm in the process of preparing my company's ecommerce site for a redesign - largely to move to a responsive design and improve issues with UI and some much-needed features. This is a very small ecommerce business (Less than $300K annually), and we have settled on Magento Community Edition for our platform. We understand it to be very "SEO" friendly, and its similar to our current platform - it gives us a lot of flexibility in design, and it appears scalable. While I am aware of our current sites shortcomings (from an SEO standpoint), I was wondering if I should employ an SEO person/company to do a pre/post redesign audit. I looked at the MOZ checklist, and ran my site through Hubspot and WooRanks free tools, and am aware of what they are reporting as SEO items to be fixed. As I am so small, I was wondering if an SEO audit in addition to what I already know might be overkill? Any thoughts/suggestions are welcome.
Web Design | | Artfx1 -
How to submit or build website like this?
Hello Experts, how to submit website like this flow, i mean how can we show our home, about us, services and contact us page like this in search engine 14dcx86.png
Web Design | | JulieWhite0 -
How much does on-site duplicated content affect SERPs?
Hi, We've recently gotten into Moz, with our E-commerce websites, and discovered that it's crawler takes note of about 2500 pages which it thinks are the same (duplicated). We've now begun to completely rewrite every description of every product (including Meta Title/Description) so that this number may be reduced. Since this is the biggest issue Moz spots I'm wondering what the effect of fixing it will be on our position in the SERP (mainly Google). Does anybody have some stories or experience about this topic? Thanks in Advance! 🙂 Alexander
Web Design | | WebmasterAlex0 -
Site redesign and links?
I have a real estate website. On my sidebar I have about 16 links to pages on various neighborhoods. I templated my site using dream weaver so the same sidebar and links are on every page. I'm thinking of redesigning the sidebar and having one link that will take visitors to a page where all the neighborhood links will be and then from there visitors can choose whichever link to go to a specific neighborhood info page. I am doing this to clear space on my side bar for other content and links. What impact would this have on my home page? The website is bronxpad.com if anyone wants to check it out and provide feedback.
Web Design | | bronxpad0 -
Will my site structure provide decent SEO?
We have an ASP.NET MVC website with a view that can dynamically display each product we offer. The product name is hyphenated in the URL, and this is what we’re using to pull the product from the database. So an example URL would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida/Sample-Product-Name We have another view that dynamically lists the products offered for each state. This page would contain links to the URL for each product offered in that state. The URL for Florida would be: http://www.mysite.com/Products/Florida We want to make sure that when we enter a new product into the database, the product is indexed by Google the next time our site is crawled. I know that Google will crawl through the links in our website, so the new product should get indexed as long as we have a link to it. In this case, the link will be on the view that lists the products for the corresponding state. I have 2 questions: 1) Is my understanding correct that Google will index the product page as long as it can find a link to it somewhere in my site? 3) To get Google to index each URL for content that is generated dynamically from a database, is having links in my site for each URL the only way to do it? Is there something we can do with the site map? Thanks in advance everyone! -Alex
Web Design | | dbuckles0