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Easiest Way To Implement Site Redesign

by Mike L.
6 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
    • |
Hi All,

I was wondering. What is the best way to add a site redesign to a site that has google rankings without considerably lossing rankings?

Do I simply have to re-add the text? What If the text must change slightly?

Is there an automated way out there to do this?

should I just hire someone to do it since I don't know which way is best?

If the crawler reads text from the top left corner and the site redesign causes that area to change, will that reduce organic traffic for the keyword?

My site has about 200 pages in total.
lots of questions I know, thanks anyway.
#easiest #implement #redesign #site
  • Profile picture of the author CarloD.
    Well,

    If your just redesigning and using the same template, all you need is to slice a new photoshop document based on the dimensions of your website. This should not affect rankings.

    However; if your pages have to be edited manually page by page, it's not worth it.

    Is your header and navigation and "outer" area within includes?

    If they are not within includes, you may want to do a full rebuild and make the site a little more dynamic... generally if all your content is the same, and you use the same description title and keywords.... you may not see much of a drop when google recrawls the website.

    BUT nothing is guaranteed...
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  • Profile picture of the author Strange
    Sometimes Google recognizes your changes and improves your rankings, not for certain though.
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  • Profile picture of the author mattalways
    If you set it up with a header & footer it will be much easier, but as pointed out above, if you don't have these sections pulled in, it's not worth the time. You can set it up so that it is dynamic and keep URL structure & meta/title data the same with some scripting.
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    Quit wasting your money! If you need a website, get me to do it right! I'll probably even do it for less! Design/Development/Software, I'm your guy! matt@snidge.com
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  • Profile picture of the author zanmanzan
    In my experience, it's the URL structure that google cares most about in a redesign. If you change the structure of the URLs, make sure you have redirection setup so google can find the pages.

    I had a site with 3000+ indexed pages, did a redesign which changed the URL structure, and lost all rankings for a month, until I setup redirects and google slowly re-crawled my site. Site still hasn't fully recovered...

    So keep the URL structure, the rest, google can handle.
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    • Profile picture of the author mattalways
      Originally Posted by zanmanzan View Post

      In my experience, it's the URL structure that google cares most about in a redesign. If you change the structure of the URLs, make sure you have redirection setup so google can find the pages.

      I had a site with 3000+ indexed pages, did a redesign which changed the URL structure, and lost all rankings for a month, until I setup redirects and google slowly re-crawled my site. Site still hasn't fully recovered...

      So keep the URL structure, the rest, google can handle.
      Isn't that an obvious one though? Your site grows with backlinks to those pages. How can you expect your pages to hold the same authority if you move the content & Google is still travelling to those pages through backlinks? It's like starting over again. It is very important to keep URL structure the same when doing a new site. If you have no traffic though, don't bother keeping the same URL's.

      Why does re-design have to change the URL's at all though unless you are also adding a CMS of some sort.
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      Quit wasting your money! If you need a website, get me to do it right! I'll probably even do it for less! Design/Development/Software, I'm your guy! matt@snidge.com
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      • Profile picture of the author zanmanzan
        Originally Posted by mattalways View Post

        Isn't that an obvious one though? Your site grows with backlinks to those pages. How can you expect your pages to hold the same authority if you move the content & Google is still travelling to those pages through backlinks? It's like starting over again. It is very important to keep URL structure the same when doing a new site. If you have no traffic though, don't bother keeping the same URL's.

        Why does re-design have to change the URL's at all though unless you are also adding a CMS of some sort.
        My mistake was moving to a new install of wordpress and I didn't update the permalinks correctly, because I was tring to make the links more SEO friendly. I knew I'd lose the backlinks while google reindexed my site. However instead they penalized me and wouldn't index the posts. I had to submit a request for them to reconsider my site.

        I was just posting as a watch out if the site redesign includes making links SEO friendly.
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