How to Maintain Search Engine Rankings on a Site Redesign
Posted on January 15, 2008 by
Adie 
SEO, Web Development 
11 Comments
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.
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Actually, as of about a month ago MSN still wasn’t following 301 redirects. It’s been that way for quite awhile now — not that many people are worried very much about MSN :D
This article goes into no real detail about how to redesign a web page other than 301-redirecting your old-renamed pages. I would think there is more to it than that.
Indeed, the 301 redirect is not actually that much related to redesign, unless you are not even changing the URL structure. With blogs the game is as most likely at homepage, secondary page of homepage, categories, secondary page of categories, archives etc etc and finally we meet the POST page.
If on your old design, you had all of your traffic landing on the homepage is more likely because your homepage is stronger and ranks better in the SERPs for the same keywords you optimized lets say the post before the latest 3. Changing the theme from homepage as landing page (because thats what becomes a homepage with more than just one post ) to post page as landing page can pass some time (until search engine recrawl all of your site and do give more value to the post page rather than homepage for certain keywords).
Another factor that matters is the coding, how was it positioned before the code, what was sitting on top and how was the spider crawling the content. If the sidebar was under the content when looking at the source, changing it on the new design (verse floating for example) will most likely have some impact (hope the coders did the job for this blog, because I would not trust them ding ding ding!! you can drop me an email if you got questions).
And as well some other aspects, but lets leave that for the author ;)
p.s. Just another example, this theme was downloaded from one server in ASCII mode and uploaded in Binary mode (or vice versa, just look at the huge spacing between lines)
Thank you - maybe you could highlight some more on your blog?
Alright, but why don’t you practice what you preach Adie? There is an old URL of NBB from my bookmarks archive (it shows 404 Error currently):
http://www.netbusinessblog.com/2007/09/25/22-world-class-headline-templates/
You haven’t set any redirects from old URL scheme. Why?
Most if not all have been updated. Its been a hard and long process as the previous owner was not really trying to hard at SEO with this blog.
To add, I haven’t used the 301 on this blog as most older content was not being ranked well anyway so I didn’t bother. It wasn’t going to hurt this blog I can tell you that.
This blog was built with Digg traffic!
I am currently manually updating older content that has links within it to the new permalink structure.
Adie, does this also hold true if I change the url of my site? I want to revamp my whole blog and move it to a new url, and of course I have a lot of content. Will i have to manually update each page to redirect?
Great post by the way