If you are thinking of a redesigning of your website or are rebranding your company and will be changing the content and URL of your website it is important to consider what will happen to your rankings and visitor numbers when the new site launches.
First of all, the important thing to remember is the SEO of your site. Ensure that the new site is fully optimised before going live and that there are no duplicate title tags or meta descriptions.
Secondly you need to think about 301 redirects. If the URL structure of your site is changing or the main URL will change once the new website goes live you need to make sure that there are 301 redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. These redirects are important for a number of reasons. Firstly they allow users searching for you, or clicking on a saved link to your site, to find the content they are looking for. If you are changing the Page structure of your site and the page names will all be different then the impact of not having these 301s will be quite large. Users won’t be able to find pages, either from their own bookmarks or from Google. If users are being present with a 404 page when clicking on a result in the SERPs then they are less likely to return to your website and more likely to use your competitor. Secondly Search Engines will have already found pages on your website, so allowing them to see a 301 from the old page URL to the new page URL will enable a faster update in the indexing of your site, and will reduce the chances of Google seeing your site as having lots of integrity issues, which will result in a reduction of your rankings. Google visits and reassess pages in the order of their importance and it can be days to a few months before all 301s are followed and incorporated in the rankings for your site. Rankings in Bing and Yahoo might take a bit longer to update as historically Bing (formally MSN) was bad at following 301s and Yahoo has a slower crawl rate than Google.
If you are changing the URL of your website 301 redirects are even more important. Redirections using a 301 automatically move your visitors from the old URL to the new site and if they are done well to the exact page the user was looking for. This will reduce the number of lost visitors if you have a holding page on the old site that asks visitors to click through to your new website.
Other things to remember when changing the URL of your site, or even just the design include: creating a sitemap.xml file, and robots.txt file. Ensure that the old URL has a sitemap.xml showing Google all of the URLs from this site which Google can then follow and find the 301s is also important, so ensure that the sitemap.xml file on the old site is up to date before the new site goes live.
Making sure that you use Google Webmaster Tools to ensure your site is being seen accurately by Google is also important and there are now options in Google Webmaster Tools to let them know if you are changing your URL.
The impact of making the move to a new website and/or URL is frequently a drop in rankings in Google, which can lead to a reduction in the number of visitors you get to the site. Keeping an eye on the SEO of your new website and the elements needed to ensure your site is fully optimised and visible by the search engines can increase your recovery time from these drops in rankings. If you are working with a professional SEO company make sure you let them know you are working on a new site as soon as you can and make sure they are advising you about the things that need to be done to the site pre and post launch.
Remember, although you might face some drops in rankings and lost traffic when your new website goes live, this won’t last forever if you have considered the SEO of you website before work begins and are monitoring how the search engines are responding to the site, including addressing any crawl issues as they appear.
Related posts:
