New Re-design will my website rankings drop?
-
Hi guys,
I have had to re-design my site although we are only 4 months into the seo game we have seen some good progress with our rankings. My question is there anything I need to consider before implementing the new designs so it doesn't effect my current rankings or any of our SEO work.
Our current designs are content thing and so we have had to create more content to better optimize our site, however if doing so will this loose our current ranking position?
Apperciate any advice around this
Thanks
-
I had a couple of people who worked on our SEO a few times but we never really got much good advice. The best advice I have had so far comes from MOZ and our most recent SEO guy, and people such as yourself. Asking these questions on moz helps reduce it.
-
I do that too. When I do a redesign, I always hire someone who knows more about SEO than I to do a site assessment and look for opportunities. It is well worth the cost. In fact it can bring payback of many times what you pay.
I do have some fear in this process too, but getting the good advice and doing things very carefully reduces that to a low level.
-
Thanks Shiv, much appreciate the feedback
-
Great thanks so much! Looks like a test dummy and screaming frog is the answer
-
Thanks so much for your help Dirk, Great idea, I'll definitely look into that.
-
Thank you Donna, will check it out
-
Hi EGOL
Thanks for your feedback. Yes there is an element of fear in there, I'm new to SEO so still trying to get my head around it all, hence why I'm here getting the assistance required to take these next steps. I have already re-designed the site, now it is ready to implement so I'm looking to see what needs to be considered before implementing the designs from an SEO point.
-
In my opinion... "How can I preserve my rankings during a site redesign?" is the wrong question.
It is the question asked by fearful people instead of by the person who is motivated to win.
If you are going to put the work of a redesign into your website, you should do the job right, do a careful evaluation and determine how the optimization, structure, SEO performance and conversion rate can be improved.
Use this as a time to study, get qualified assistance and make some clear gains.
When will you have time and the money to do these things properly again?
If you go into this and the SEO is fixated on avoiding loss, says nothing of opportunities and how you are going to kick things up a notch then you are wasting your time and have hired the wrong person.
-
I like this how to retain at least 95% of your organic traffic guide from quick sprout. Very helpful. b-s.ee/1pvTWfc
-
If it's just design that changes it will normally have no negative impact on your site - if you do a good job it could even improve your rankings if user experience improves (increase time/visit, time/page & lower bounce rate)
If it has impact on your site structure I would do as ofw12387 : deploy a test site & use Screaming Frog to do a full audit:
- crawl your current site - export everything to xls
- crawl the new version of the site - based on the url's of the first crawl to check if everything is properly redirected
Export the results and compare with the original results in xls. - Do a final crawl on the new site (spider mode) - to see that all url's are accessible & that the site structure didn't change (pushing content deeper in the site)
If you have traffic on image search - also check that the position & the names of the images are not changing.
Good luck with the redesign,
Dirk
-
Please make sure the URL structure remains same in new website, as SEO majorly depends upon permalinks(URLs).
-
If you do a good job, you will not lose any ranking.
You should:
-
Check that all the meta tags / canonicals / titles reminds as before
-
Be sure that the url structure reminds exactly as before
I would recommend you not go process the modification directly in production. Use a dummy server for it and check with Screaming FROG that everything is ok. And then, when you are sure everything looks ok, go to production
-
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
-
Website redesign- change of server . What to do with old site? Keep for a while or delete right away?
Hey Mozzers, Two days ago, we redesigned our website and changed the server at the same time to get faster loading times. Here is what we have done. The old site was hosted on ipage, new site with a new design hosted on UPCLOUD. We changed the A record to the new server, uploaded a new site, submitted a new sitemap to Google Search console, 301 redirected all old URLs to new ones, most have changed a bit. Old URLs were ending with " .html "the new ones do not have that at the end. Submitted AMP pages to Google as well. Now here is my question. Should we delete the old site completely from ipage or should we keep it for a while? Google has indexed the new URLs that were created with the redesign, these URLs did not exist on the old site. But it still shows most of the old URLs on SERPs (these are URLs that have been 301 redirected to a new equivalent page) I understand 2 days is not very long for Google to get everything right, but I am not sure what we should do with the old site? Keep it or get rid of it to help Google index the new one only. FYI every single old URL that appears on Google search when clicked on will take you to the right place, we made sure there are no 404s at all. As this is very important to our business and we get most of it from Google I want to make sure we do it right for SEO purposes. The agency that designed the site did not really know the answer to that question, as they do not have SEO specialists. Please help, any input you might have will be greatly appreciated.
Web Design | | Davit19850 -
Will There Be Much Impact When Moving Site To New Root Folder?
Hi, ok so I have a pretty big site that is located on my sever /root/current-folder/. I want to rebuild the site completely as it's using software that is out of date and not our main focus anymore (OpenCart). We want to move to a Wordpress platform, but want to have as little impact on the SEO as possible. Our current strategy is: List all URLs/Titles/Meta indexed with Google on current site Create new folder on the server /root/new-folder/ My question is... if I move to a new folder on the server (same TLD) and then re-route the TLD to go to this new folder, will there be more of an impact on SEO that if I start a fresh in the current folder? Thanks
Web Design | | Easigrass0 -
Server performance and loss of rankings
Hi all Wondering if anyone knows how much poor server performance is needed to affect your Google rankings. A few sites of mine were performing fine until about 11am today, since then the site traffic is down about 99% (eeek) at the same time the server was playing up with a server load about 40 - it's 12core, 64ram. I was having database issues at the time too. Surely Google doesn't work that fast in demoting sites for poor performance does it? If not need I need to ponder other reasons why i have no traffic anymore. Thanks, Carl
Web Design | | carl_daedricdigital0 -
Website Drops Some Traffic after Redesign. What's Happening?
What it is NOT: No Link was broken. I have used Moz, Screaming Frog, Excel, etc - there are not broken links. We have not added spammy links. We kept the same amount of links and content on the homepage - with an exception of 1 or 2. All the pages remained canonical. Our blog uses rel=prev rel=next, and each page is canonicalized to itself. We do not index duplicated content. Our tags are content="noindex,follow" We are using the Genesis Framework (we were not before.) Load time is quicker - we now have a dedicated server. Webmaster tools has not reported any crawl report problems. What we did that should have improved our rankings and traffic: Implemented schema.org Responsive design Our bounce rate is down - Average visit length is up. Any ideas?
Web Design | | Thriveworks-Counseling0 -
Responsive Design vs Mobile For This Site?
They are going to do an entire website redesign for http://gaport.com/ and I think they should adhere to responsive design best practices. However, I'm just saying that because everything I have read says that's the "way of the future" if not the way of the present already. Any reason, they shouldn't do that and keep the desktop/mobile sites? Thanks, Ruben
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Will keyword optimization for a landing page impact SEO for subsequent pages?
For example, if I optimize keyword “pleurx” really well on our landing page, I'd like to know if subsequent
Web Design | | Todd_Kendrick
pages linking back to that landing page will rank higher than before for “pleurx”
even if “pleurx” wasn't optimized on the subsequent pages. Thanks! -Andrew0 -
Question re. crawlable textual content
I have a client who is struggling to fit crawlable textual content on their pages. I'm wondering if we can add a "Learn More..." feature that works as a mouse over pop up. When a page visitor runs their curser over the link or button, a window bubble pops up and textual content about the page will show. Not knowing much about code, can text in this format be crawlable by search engines and count as unique and relevant content? Thanks, Dino
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Over Optimization & Footer Links for Crediting Web Design to a Company
With the recent updates to the algorithm having to do with link networks and over optimization it has got me to thinking about the footer links we add to each site that we build and do web design for linking back to ours. I could certainly see how Google could make the assumption that these are all on the same server, pointing back to one main site, and penalize us for that. Should we no=follow these links? They may say something like, "Website Designed By: Company Name". They do provide a valuable source to some extent of traffic to the site from people interested in our designs. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | JoshGill270