How to change the entire contents and design in my site without getting troubles with google?

[JonsonSwartz]

Hello everyone

This is my first post over here.

In the next few weeks we going to change the entire content and design in our site. The site has 240 pages with poor contents and design.

Except 301 redirects for all the old url’s I wanted to consult with you what is the right way to do it without harm my organic traffic that come from google?

How google refers to this kind of changes?

Which steps should I need to take to do it properly?

Hope to get your help in the issue.

Tahnks in advance.

[eyepaq]

Hi,

If you change content, design and URLs in the same time you won't be able to assess the reason behind an improvement in rankings or a negative effect in rankings.

Let's say you change all 3 in the same time and you get a slight increasing rankings - you will be happy but the setup behind this is that the content change had a huge positive impact and the design and url changes had a negative effect - you only see the final end result  - this is just an example.

The bottom line is that you can get the best out of it if you do it step by step as you can adjust, roll back, edit in order to get the best out of it.

The last change I would do is the URL change and always have a fix and clear procedure in place for this as it is important (if you have some visibility now and the risk of losing something is big).

Cheers.

[JonsonSwartz]

First of all thank you very much for your replay.

Why I can’t just made all the changes in one shot?

About the url’s, Unfortunately our current status requires us to change them because they are really not friendly ; )

What are you suggest to do about that?

[eyepaq]

Hi,

If you improve it : design (usability) and content - Google will be the happiest and it will rank accordantly (the only "but" is that - it needs to be a real improvement).

The only golden rule I would follow is - do not change the URLs. If you really really want to change the URLs too do that on a later stage not during the content and design changes. When you do that - just update the old 301 redirects to the new format and add new 301 redirects for the "current" structure to the "future" one - don't use 301 redirect hoops - this is really important.

Best case scenario in my view:

Step 1: Update content only, wait for changes to be visibile: rankings, traffic, CTR etc - track result, assess feedback from all platforms available: seomoz, Web master Tools, google analytics etc etc. Doing this you will see exactly how much of an impact had this content update.

Step 2: Update design - similar with step 1- assess, track, analyze. See how much impact this usability had on the numbers, engagement etc. Use Split A/B testing from Google Analytics to see what version is better and decide based on your users engagement not on your personal preferences.

Step 3: update URls - only if really really needed.

Wait for some time between those steps - based on the size - a few weeks, a few months.

Be ready to roll back if disaster strikes on any of the steps...

Hope it helps as an outside suggestions.

Cheers.