SEO is part science, part art. There are factors within our control and those that are not. The ones that can be controlled are the fundamentals, the nuts and bolts such as making pages search engine friendly and the way in which those pages are promoted. This also requires tracking and monitoring trends and taking action pro-actively.
When you make changes to your site or a directory or even individual pages the last thing you want is to waste any accrued value that you’ve built.
The point of all this is that if you don’t plan, and attend to the fundamentals, your site is likely to suffer in search if you make substantial changes without factoring in how to manage the SEO associated with those changes.
Case in point- the BBC’s weather pages.
In the last week (I think) the top level “weather” page was overhauled with a design and content refresh. It looks good and works well, but when I search for “weather” the site is nowhere to be found. It used to be #1- or at least top 3, but now a search for “weather” doesn’t even find the right pages in the top 30.
The weather site, which hangs off the news site, is one of the best UK weather resources. I do a fair bit of walking so it has become important to me, and I’m guessing thousands of others. Not being able to find it easily is a problem, more for the BBC than me.
With a domain as powerful as the BBC’s it is likely to bounce back quickly, but if you don’t have the luxury of that level of authority, and you don’t manage page and site changes, the effect can be profound.
It may take something as simple as mapping “old” to “new” pages and setting up 301 permanent redirections, and promoting the “new”
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