How to Maintain Search Engine Rankings on a Site Redesign

One part of owning a website that will keep Designers busy is the redesign – you will need one soon I promise!

Whether the look of the site needs updating or the functionality some of not all websites change frequently and this can compromise your search engine rankings. Web designers now need to be very aware of Organic Search Engine Rankings when changing a clients website. It’s not just a simple case of deleting your old files and uploading the newly redesigned site.

Because all your pages have already been ranked and given a listing, any change to a page name or the platform it resides on could be and more than likely be lost. This could mean loss of your business, earnings, everything!

You need to plan carefully yo get this right when thinking about updating your website. I have found one simple solution is to use URL Mapping.

It works by first creating a list of all your old page names and a brief description of what they are about. This is going to be crucial when mapping the old pages to newly designed pages. I recommend you use the faithful 301 Redirect (permanent) This is what all search engines will accept under their rules, Google, Yahoo, MSN, will now read the old page then see it has been changed then your 301 redirect will kick in and this will mean if you had a good ranking it will not be lost and PageRank will also flow through to the new page.

If you’re on a Linux server renaming your pages is easy – just open your .htaccess file if you do not have one make one using notepad and name it .htaccess. Your server will need to have mod_rewrite enabled (check your host for this).

Once you have a complete list of your old pages and you have used a redirect statement for them you can then upload the new ones.

301 needed for .htaccess –

‘redirect 301 / index.html www.yourwebsite.com/index.php or

‘RewriteRule index.html$ www.yourwebsite.com/index.php [R301]‘

All good web designers and coders should tell you this anyway, if you are going to outsource your web design/coding etc. If you’re doing it all yourself always get advice.