What are the best practices with website redesign & redirects?
-
I have a website that is not very pretty but has great rankings. I want to redesign the website and loose as little rankings as possible and still clean up the navigation. What are the best practices? Thanks in advance.
-
Hi there
Here are some great resources:
Web Fundamentals (Google)
Multi Design Layouts (Google)
The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Web Design & Development (Moz)
Designing for SEO (Moz)
Information Architecture for SEO (Moz)
The Process of Web Design: From Discovery to Prototype (Moz)I would also make sure that you focus on user experience not just from the design aspect, but the content aspect as well. Here's another great resource on that.
When you are ready to move your site, make sure you review this resource from Google, as well as this migration guide from Moz.
All of the above should help you get started - make sure that you review with your web development team and review the following on your current site:
- All KPIs that matter most to your visibility / performance
- Your site's goals over time
- Google Search Console performance over time (impressions / rankings)
- Take a look at your competitors
- Check your on-site SEO
- Check your backlinks
- Check your content
- Check your information architecture
- Learn more about your audience
- Are you capturing your audience at the right points? Do you have content to do so?
- Are you doing everything you can do develop your brand(s) right now?
Sometimes it may be a matter of a redesign and not a new site overall. There's a great Whiteboard Friday that touches on elements of this topic called Should I Rebrand and Redirect My Site? Should I Consolidate Multiple Sites/Brands?
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301s?
We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301 redirects or will search engines know to remove the old 404 pages from the SERPs? We are redesigning our existing website. The domain is staying the same, but the sub-structure and page names are changing. Do I still need to do 301s?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GrandOptimizations0 -
Whats the best way to set up a directory listing website
Hello all, I am building a website that lists homeschool events and field trips across various states (locker-time.com) and I have a few questions on setting it up correctly. Both the events and field trips are searchable by distance. For clarification, events are associated with a specific date and time and field trips are not. I currently have a link that says homeschool events and you enter your zip to find things close by. Is it better to create a separate page for each state I am targeting instead? So the link would be homeschool events and then a sub-link that says homeschool events in GA and the GA page brings up all the events in GA, still searchable by zip. Or does it matter? I was thinking if its a separate page, I could put keyword rich copy on top, but then clicking on the menu and choosing the appropriate sub-menu is an additional step for users on the site and as the number of states increase, that sub-menu could get pretty big. The search results pages lists the post title of any events or field trips found and the links go to a page on my website with more information, such as the location, details on the event / field trip and a link to their website. I am wondering for SEO purposes, is this the right way to do it? Or I could set up the results page to show an excerpt and some listing info and then link directly to their website. Does it matter? I was thinking a page on my own website since then I could add images (but that might end up sucking up all my hosting space). As I am adding these listings to my website, I simply copied/pasted the details on the event. Now that I'm thinking about it, original content is best, so should I stop doing that and rewrite the description in my own words? Since the events are date specific events and when they pass, they are no longer on the site, does it matter as much for the events? The field trips do not have dates associated with them, so I can probably work on creating my own descriptions for those. Just not sure if I should bother with events that are more short term. Thanks in advance for ANY advice or suggestions. I'm so looking forward to getting this all set up correctly! I find working on this SEO stuff such fun! Jeanette
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fatcreat0 -
Best Approach to Redirect One Domain to Another
So I'm about to migrate one domain to another. Lets say I'm migrating boo.com to foo.com. Boo.com has good organic traffic & has some really well ranked pages. For this reason (I think) I want to send that traffic to some where other than the foo.com homepage. Perhaps a catered landing page. My question is can I redirect some of the specific pages on boo.com to a landing page on foo.com & then redirect the delta to foo.com's homepage? Or am a risking not fully transferring the full credit of one domain to another if I take that approach & therefore I should just redirect one domain to the other in its entirety? Thanks, Rich
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RPD0 -
"Starting Over" With A New Domain & 301 Redirect
Hello, SEO Gurus. A client of mine appears to have been hit on a non-manual/algorithm penalty. The penalty appears to be Penguin-like, and the client never received any message (not that that means it wasn't manual). Prior to my working with her, she engaged in all kinds of SEO fornication: spammy links on link farms, shoddy article marketing, blog comment spam -- you name it. There are simply too many tens of thousands of these links to have removed. I've done some disavowal, but again, so much of the link work is spam. She is about to launch a new site, and I am tempted to simply encourage her to buy a new domain and start over. She competes in a niche B2B sector, so it is not terribly competitive, and with solid content and link earning, I think she'd be ok. Here's my question: If we were to 301 the old website to the new one, would the flow of page rank outperform any penalty associated with the site? (The old domain only has a PR of 2). Anyone like my idea of starting over, rather than trying to "recover?" I thank you all in advance for your time and attention. I don't take it for granted.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RCNOnlineMarketing0 -
Content Marketing: Should we build a separate website or built in site within the Website itself?
Hi Mozzers, Client: Big carpet cleaner player in the carpet cleaning industry Main Goal: Creating good content to Get more organic traffic to our main site Structure of the extra content: It will act like a blog but will be differentiated from the regular site by not selling anything but just creating good content. The look and design will be different from the client's site. SEO question: In terms of SEO, what would be the most beneficial for us to do, should we built in this new section/site outside or inside the client's site? I personally think that it should be separated from the main site because of the main reasons: A followed link to the main site Anchor texts implementation linking back to our service pages If we would to choose to build in this content, it would be highly beneficial for getting organic traffic within the main site but I am afraid this will not provide us any link juice since anchor texts won't be accounted the same since all of those would be located in the Nav bar of the main site. Can someone tell me what would be the best in terms of SEO? P.S: My boss doesn't agree with me and would rather go the second option (build in within the main site) that's why i am asking you guys what would be the most beneficial? Thank you Guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
301 redirect help
Hey guys, I normally work in WordPress and just use a 301 redirect plugin. I bought a site and rather than maintain two similar ones have decided to redirect one to the other. I am having trouble with the .htaccess file. Here is an example. These are two redirects: redirect 301 /category/models/next/2
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DanDeceuster
redirect 301 /category/models I want both of these URLs to redirect to the same URL of the new site. However, the /category/models is the only one working. It redirects to the new page just fine. The /category/models/next/2 is redirecting to nearly the same URL on the new site, only it is adding /next/2 to the end and that is bringing up a 404. Why is it adding /next/2 to the new URL? How can I fix this? There are several doing this. Help appreciated!0 -
Website Siloing..best practice?
Hi all I am doing some research this week on the effects of siloing a Magento site. We have about 1,654 pages with approx 1,400 products. We want to silo the website in order to address the internal linking issues and to also focus the customer journey in a more organised way. I need to report all of the possible angles and effects that this will have on the site, prior to implementing it. Does anyone have info on best practice for siloing? I'd appreciate any help... Thanks Nick
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Total_Displays0 -
Have I missed anthing On this website?
Hello SEO MOzzers, I am today wanting your feedback on a site that I recently went live with. My Google rankings for the main keywords are doing very well considering the site has been live for 3 weeks now. I of course have a list of items that i'm still working on, completing meta description tags, title tags, adding copy content to category pages, updating h1 tags, working on our backlinking campaign, etc. Is there anthing any of you SEO Mozzers can see that I may have missed? the web domain is www.carbodypanels4u.co.uk Keywords "body Panels"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seohive-222720
"car body panels"
"Car Make body panels"
"Car make Model body panel" Im sure you get the gist of the keyword structure. Your feedback is much appreciated as always. shiv0