Making unresponsive site responsive, should I expect any ranking penalties?
-
Hello,
I have a website made with asp.net and ranking quite well for a number of competitive keywords like in google top 10 results for more than a dozen competitive keywords.
Recently in order for better user experience, I am having it developed so it is fully responsive for all screen resolutions. Basically all the design element / site text will remain the same including color scheme / layout etc outwardly but internally this will change everything all the css / page html (tables converted to divs) etc.
Now my question is:
1. Will this considered by bots a complete site overhaul and ranking will take a hit even if I stay with current platform i.e. asp.net?
2. While making design responsive I can also develop a wordpress theme, which will make it easier to work with the website as the site does not require any programming. So if I also change the platform like from MS IIS/asp to Apache / php how will search engine bots take this?
3. If above in fact will result in ranking drop, how much time will it take for the rankings to get back to normal?
Note that I use extensionless urls so the urls will remain the same as well even if we convert from asp to php.
Sorry for long details but question is bugging me from weeks.
-
I'd recommend you run some A/B tests. In our experience with site revamps, it's best to ensure your visitors are happy first, whcih you can measure using conversion rates.
If you notice a big dip in conversions, something may be broken which could then have a knock-on effect with your rankings.
From a massive revamp we recently did to make things responsive (1.5M pges) we noticed an increase in most of our rankings.
But just remember - treat google as a mobile user, so if you start simple and progressively add more content via ajax as the screen size increases, remember google may not pick these up, it will see your 'simplest' page, so make sure you don't remove any important on-page factors.
-
Hi,
I did several major site migrations in recent months and if you get the basics right, there should be no (negative) impact on your rankings. It's a myth that site migrations always lead to a drop in rankings. Changing technology should not have an impact - Google is all about the user experience, not about the technology used to create the user experience. Having a responsive site should increase your traffic (and rankings).
Not affiliated to them - but as already indicated by Travis a tool like Screaming Frog (the paid version) is almost a pre-requisite for a successful migration.
The main thing you should take care of is that all your current url's are properly redirected to avoid 404's after migration. You indicate that the url's are not going to change so this should be no problem. To be sure - crawl your current website with a tool (like ScreamingFrog) to get the full list of url's. Export the list of url's & replace the current domain with your test domain and crawl the responsive version based on this list. Check if all url's return a 200 status (if they return a 301 - check if the redirected url's return a 200 status). As a side effect, crawling your current site could also show you other areas of improvement like images that are too heavy, endless loops, unbalanced site structure, etc. If you encounter issues with your current site - try to solve them with the migration.
Compare the main on-page items between the two sites (H1, page title, metadescription) - in your case they should be identical (if you use ScreamingFrog this is a pretty basic task - just export the craw results to xls & see if they match)
Crawl your new site - check if the number of pages crawled is identical (or close) to the number of pages crawled on the current site. Screamingfrog allows you to see the site structure - compare it with your current site, to be sure that important content is not pushed deeper into your site.
Use a tool like webpagetest.org to check the speed of your site - both for your current site and your new site to be sure that with the new designs you are not slowing down your site - do this for a number of typical pages on your site (hint: look at your most popular landing pages in Analytics). Do the same checks with https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ - see if you improve the results with your new responsive site. Your score for mobile should be a lot better - if not - you did something wrong with your re-design.
For your most important pages (probably your most important landing pages / most visited pages) - do some visual checks between old & new site - is all the content present, does it look ok, ...etc.
I don't know if you get a lot of traffic from image search (check your webmastertools). If this is the case: if the url's and/or the names of the images change - make sure that the 'old' images remain accessible under the old url (in my experience it takes a bit longer for google to update the index for Image search).
Make sure that your sitemap is updated when migrating. Probably you block your test site for indexing - don't forget to remove this when putting your new site online.
After migration, check your webmastertools for 404's - idem for Google Analytics. Correct 404's as fast as possible (make sure that your 404 page is tagged in Analytics).
To answer your point 3 - if something goes wrong during migration, in my experience you should count on approx. 3 months for recovery, but with no guarantee that you'll return to previous positions, so better make sure that you get the points above right from the start.
Good luck with the migration!
-
Why not just adopt WordPress? ; ) I generally don't work with the .Net platform in the wild, unless I'm prospecting. You may or may not believe some of the crazy things that platform does out of the box. So make sure to get a full crawl of the site and sort out any issues prior to dev work. I recommend Screaming Frog in most instances. But if you have a gigantic site and/or you may not be able to identify problems readily, you may find Deep Crawl worth the price.
At any rate, just make sure you have a pre and post launch crawl for comparison. That alone can save you hours of time, should something go a awry. If nothing else the crawls will help a consultant, should you need one in the future.
Since you're making major site changes, it's also a good idea to get some site speed benchmarks. (Get benchmarks under various traffic loads, if possible.) It's possible that you can end up with a slower site, even though it's responsive. There are a number of ways that can happen, but at least you'll know if you have a speed problem.
I recommend GTmetrix and Pingdom for the above tasks. Here are some really simple fixes from Feed The Bot that should help with speed, once you're on an Apache server.
Just remember, redesigns are a great time to catch any loose ends you 'didn't have time for' or were 'minor problems'. Those minor problems stack up to considerable wins, once they're righted. You're on the right path with a responsive redesign. Remember to preserve the source order of the site between versions (desktop, mobile, tablet) as much as possible. That will help with the speed as well.
-
Hi-
If the page content is the same is the url structure is the same, I don't suspect you'll see too much, if any, damage. You might even do better because you went responsive. Just be careful to make sure of things like placement of the title tag, etc, and your stylings (H1, etc) are similar to where they were before.
Good Luck
Ken
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
-
Site ranks good for all keywords except the important ones
Hey guys I am the marketing manager for https://www.tadibrothers.com/, i started a year ago when the website was ranked very poorly on most keywords, I got most of our nitch keywords rank well to fist page except the most important ones. backup camera
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TadiBrothers
backup camera system
wireless backup camera system
rear view camera Our backlinks campaign is doing well 15 backlinks on average every month.
on-site optimization is also good.
Our Domain authority is better than all our competitors. Can anyone Please help me to understand why they do not rank well? Hope to hear from someone soon1 -
When Mobile and Desktop sites have the same page URLs, how should I handle the 'View Desktop Site' link on a mobile site to ensure a smooth crawl?
We're about to roll out a mobile site. The mobile and desktop URLs are the same. User Agent determines whether you see the desktop or mobile version of the site. At the bottom of the page is a 'View Desktop Site' link that will present the desktop version of the site to mobile user agents when clicked. I'm concerned that when the mobile crawler crawls our site it will crawl both our entire mobile site, then click 'View Desktop Site' and crawl our entire desktop site as well. Since mobile and desktop URLs are the same, the mobile crawler will end up crawling both mobile and desktop versions of each URL. Any tips on what we can do to make sure the mobile crawler either doesn't access the desktop site, or that we can let it know what is the mobile version of the page? We could simply not show the 'View Desktop Site' to the mobile crawler, but I'm interested to hear if others have encountered this issue and have any other recommended ways for handling it. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | merch_zzounds0 -
Huge drop in rankings for specialist life insurance site
I work with a site who specialise in life insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions - http://goo.gl/Drwre6. The site has ranked really well historically, but was hit hard on 16th June when we saw an almost 100% drop in rankings overnight. We picked up on quite a few issues straight away and rectified these. A list of steps we've taken so far are below: removed CSS & JS files from robots.txt changed hosting provider back, as it had recently been moved somewhere new updated copy on main landing pages to remove small amounts that were duplicated requested removal of some suspicious looking backlinks and submitted a disavow found and removed a test site that was live and indexable found an external site that had scraped copy from our site - requested removal (this site is no longer live) cleaned up any 404 and ensured all redirects are working correctly updated the diabetes page to include more valuable info - including linking out to authority sites After taking all these steps, we have still seen no improvement. It could be that Google just hasn't yet re-crawled the site to take the changes into account...? We're aware of one other site in our industry that has noticed a drop in rankings in the last couple of months, but a number of our competitors are still ranking well for our target terms. We wonder if the site was caught up in the Payday Loans update, as the timings almost line up. Other sites with spammy medical content seem to have been hit, so we wonder if the "medical" type content on our site could have been penalised? Incredibly frustrating if so, as it's a valid, genuine service being offered! Really at a bit of a loss as to what to do next, so any help would be hugely appreciated! Katie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Digirank0 -
Ranking sites in vertical markets with 90% scraped content
Hi, Hoping to get advice about ranking sites (a vertical market search engine/portal like a car site for example) that gets its content from scraping car sites. For various reasons (mostly scale eg cant get car dealers to push their listings to us) content was scraped. The startup has received great press, TV interviews, incubator programs etc, and has also secured very significant investment. I feel if this site was launched pre-panda it would be ranking much better. We have invested significantly in our tech, our search tools and site innovation place us easily as market leader in this space. Anyone with experience in ranking sites with legitimate reasons for using scraped content?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edthomasnp0 -
My site is always in the top 4 on google, and sometimes goes to #2\. But the site at #1 is always at #1 .. how can i beat them?
So i'm sure this is a very generic question.. of course everyone wants to be #1. We are an ecommerce web site. We have all sorts of products, user ratings, and are loved by our customers. We sell over 3 million a year. So let me give you some data.. First of all one of the sites that keeps taking the #2 or #3 spot is amazons category for what we sell.. (i'm not sure if I should say who we are here.. as I don't want the #1 spot to realize we are trying to take them over!) Amazon of course has a domain authority of 100. But they never take the #1 spot. The other site that takes the #2 and #3 spot is not even selling anything. Happens to be a technical term's with the same name wikipedia page! (i wish google would figure out people aren't looking for that!) Anyways.. every day we bouce back and forth between #4 and #2.. but #1 never changes.. Here are the stats of us verse #1 from moz: #1: Page Authority: 56.8, Root Domains Linking to page: 158, Domain Authority: 54.6: root domains linking to the root domain 1.42k my site: Page Authority: 60.6, Root domains linking to the page: 562, Domain Authority: 52.8: root domains linking to the root domain: 1.03k So they beat us in domain authority SLIGHTLY and in root domains linking to the root domain. So SEO masters.. what do I do to fix this? Get better backlinks? But how.... I can't just email GQ and ask them to write about us can I? I'm open to all things.. Maybe i'm not using moz data correctly.. We should at least be #2. We get #2 every other day.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 88mph0 -
Site rankings steadily decreasing - do I need to remove links?
Since mid-April, our ranking have been steadily declining. Our two main keywords are 'nuts and bolts' and 'bolts and nuts'. 'nuts and bolts' dropped from 7th to 46th in May and has recovered slightly to 28th, and 'bolts and nuts' moved from 7th to 16th, and is today 24th. Ranking on keywords we specialise in have fared better, but they're fairly niche. 'bsw bolts' has moved from 2nd to 4th, and 'imperial bolts' has moved from 1st to 4th. I think my link profile is the issue. I don't think we've been penalised by Penguin directly (I may be wrong, I don't think we'd be page 2 on such a competitive term as 'bolts and nuts' after Penguin if we had been penalised.), but I think what's happened is that sites that link to us have been penalised, resulting in a knock on effect. Does that sound right? Here's my link profile: <a rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?site=www.thomassmithfasteners.com</a> I've been slowly building relevant links with prospective customers and kept up a very basic social media profile - just the odd blog post and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. Do I need to delete all the directory links? We do have links from directories that don't look fantastic, more are shown in Webmaster Tools than are listed here. Some of the directories no longer seem to exist, I take it I don't need to do anything and Google will catch up in those cases. Should I attempt to remove (or disavow) all links with names like best-directory etc? Or should I just concentrate on building better links? I'm not sure where to start! Any advice is greatly appreciated. Best Regards, Stephen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stephenshone0 -
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 -
How can someone not call B.S. on this site ranking 4th.
We manage a lot of sites that are around pharmaceuticals and lawsuits. I was checking a couple of the sites around the keyword: Actos Lawsuit using the keyword difficulty with serp analysis. Our sites have done very little Adwords except for first month about a year ago and we have always ranked well and the client is very happy with the results. Tonight I notice a site that is http://wikilawsuit.org/drug-recalls/actos-side-effects-bladder-cancer-actos-lawsuit/ They are ranked fourth on Google. Our url which is http://actos-lawsuit.org/ is ranked 9th?? Frankly there are several sites ranked ahead and when you look at the parameters all the way across some we are killing. But Wiki, everyone is killing and it is still fourth. I ran it in OSE and the metrics came back better, but there is at best 3 to 4 real links out of 30 domains. This is a commercial site with a contact form in right sidebar and my guess is they are selling leads to lawyers. So they are about as Wiki as Hooters. That said, we see all the talk about quality links and I am seeing a lot of sites with few quality links and lots of junk links. Should we still believe it matters? Or, is it that it matters when the sites are huge (JC Penny), etc. but not if the site is under some critical number of poor links? Looking forward to a moz Fest on this.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertFisher0