February 2007

If you ever want to redesign your website and not lose your search engine rankings, there’re a few simple precautions that should be taken.

First of all, the most important issue to consider is whether your site actually needs a redesign. Can you just do away with the content that doesn’t work, and keep the content that does work? If you’re not getting contacts through the web, could you just add contact information or a button that leads to a form on each page? If visitors bailout quickly, is it because your home page isn’t any good and not necessarily because your entire site isn’t any good? Identify the faults of your site and try to keep changes small. Making small changes is always better than overhauling an entire site if you want to retain the search rankings you already have. The reason is simple: search engines have a record and history for the pages that already rank well. If you change the structure of your site, that record will either be completely lost or it will take a good amount of time (perhaps, at least half a year) before it will be reassigned to the appropriate pages. Whenever you change the URLs of your sites pages, you can expect a loss in traffic at least temporarily (unless the pages never received traffic in the first place).

Minimizing the Impact

To minimize the impact of a redesign, you should try to:

• Continue use of search engine readable content. If you’re adding Flash or Ajax, use sparingly.
• Maintain the same title tags and basic content for pages that rank well.
• Minimize the number of broken links that remain in the search engines. This is precautionary. It’s possible that Google judges a site to be of poor quality if it has a large percentage of broken links. Pages that no longer exist can be 301 redirected or excluded in a robots.txt file.
• Keep the URLs of successful pages the same.
• 301 redirect search engines to a page’s new location so that its backlinks aren’t lost, if the page’s URLs can’t be kept the same.
• Employ a 404 page that catches visitors who try to access pages that don’t exist. Include a short explanation, a search box, and links to new pages.

SEO Site Redesign

When redesigning a site, try not to change the pages that are doing well. Images, fonts – the look of the page – aren’t going to affect search engines. Linking structure, html titles, and on the page copy will. If the pages have to be changed, there will most likely be a trade-off. To minimize the trade-off, use 301 redirects for changed URLs.

Always make sure that you consider the user as well. A redesigned site should follow good principles of usability and transition visitors to the new look.