Where Have all my Rankings Gone?
Redesigning Your Website Can Make Your Search Engine Rankings Disappear
Stop! Read before you launch that shiny new website. Time and time again I meet clients that have a similar issue, they just launched a beautiful looking website but are no longer ranking in Google. A site redesign is one of the most common causes for companies loosing their search engine rankings.
Whenever you are going to redesign a website there is a very specific process you will want to follow in order to keep your search engine rankings. Terms like search engine optimization, or SEO, are common enough these days that a lot of people understand that their website needs to contain quality content and be properly optimized for the search engines. Assuming you get that step correct during the redesign process, the area where most companies go astray is not redirecting their old web pages to the new website.
Organize and Plan Your Redirects
The first step you will want to take is to list every page of your old website in a column in an excel spreadsheet. In the second column put the url from the new website that best corresponds to the page from the old website. This process will help you organize your redirects.
Once you have launched the new website you will need to perform a 301 redirect (permanent redirect) for all of the old urls (column 1 of the excel spreadsheet) to the new urls (column 2 of the excel spreadsheet). If you are using linux hosting with the Apache Mod Re-Write Module enabled, you will add your redirects to a .htaccess file and load it to the server. If you’re using IIS you will need to have server access to perform the redirects. If you don’t know what you have, then it’s best to get your webmaster involved.
Now that your redirects are in place, the search engines will pass on your old rankings to your new website in the short term. If your new site is not as well optimized, or the content is deemed less relevant than your old website by the search engines, your rankings will eventually suffer.
Have any tips or tools that make the redesign process easier? Let us know by posting a comment below.
