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How to Redesign a Website While Staying in Google
Article last updated on 01 August 2009
Redesigning your website should be as coordinated as redecorating your house. Careful planning is required, and attention to detail should not be forgotten.
Again, like decorating a house, lots of people worry about getting it right when redesigning their website – more so the webmasters looking after the website. The main issue here isn’t whether the web server is set up correctly for the new website, or whether the website’s architecture will work – a more stressful issue is how to keep your website in Google and ranking well.
Your aim is to make the transition invisible from the old website to the new website seamless to the user.
Step 1 – Planning and Preparation
Proper planning and preparation are the key to getting the new design right, before you even think about swapping to your new website you should have already thought about the following key points and if not you might find going back to the drawing board is the only option.
You should start by preparing to redesign the website; this includes looking at how you can make future moves easier too. The first thing would be to ensure that the new design is structured correctly. Just because the old design ranks well in Google, it does not mean to say everything has to stay the same.
If you once had a page located at "http://www.example.com/site/new/pages/aboutus.html" you should not use this as a basis to call your new page "aboutus.html" and place it in some obscure place.
You are just as well giving your page a clearer name like "about-us.html" or even "about.html" to make it easier to type and remember. A strange and new technology called 301 redirects will take care of the leg work ensuring the page remains ranked in Google.
Just as changing the page name is acceptable – changing the domain name to reflect your new branding will also go down fine just so long as your old pages use a 301 redirect to their new location for at least half a year.
At this moment in time, you probably want to clean up the information on your website but you have to apply some common sense on whether you should or not. News articles that have not changed in months shouldn’t suddenly be changed to sound better for the simple fact that the information is relied on as a source of accurate stories of events in time.
Then again, a page full of paid links should go, they are harmful to your website and your websites ranking in Google. Rather than deleting the file completely, you should replace the file with a message explaining that you no longer accept payments for links and then include a bunch of useful links you think visitors may find useful.
Step 2 – Natural Search Engine Optimisation
All of this talk about natural search engine optimisation is very important, and remains important even when redesigning.
You should not do anything radical to your website, such as add an extra thousand pages if your website has been increasing in size by 2 to 3 pages a day, instead you should continue to add new pages at the same rate. On the opposite end of the scale, just because you are developing a new website, you should not just burry the old website and forget about it.
You should not make any changes to static content unless the changes are purposeful and meaningful. The homepage and any like it should have a list of recent changes and featured content relevant to the times. Static pages such as information about your website, who you are and what your objectives are should be left as is. Of course if you feel the information is of such poor quality you are better off replacing the information with fresh and relevant content.
Another thing you should look at is developing your website with the latest web standards, this includes using UTF-8 encoding where possible and HTML 4 or XHTML 1 (the current W3C recommendations at time of publication).
You should try to remove any SEO tricks that once worked and now do nothing for you. You should also look at canonicalising your pages to help your new pages rank better. As a rule of thumb, if "/about-us/index.html" is visited more than "/about-us/" you would canonicalise your page to the first.
Something you should avoid if possible is changing your title, meta keywords, meta description and h1 elements as these all constitute as part of the content. Changing these before something big such as a redesign could result in a disaster.
Step 3 – Prevention
You want to prevent as many errors as possible with your redesign, as any errors would annoy and or confuse your visitors who may already be confused about the change in aesthetics.
By catching 404 errors and logging them, you can prevent carrying over existing errors. You can help reduce any confusion at later stages by setting up 301 redirects to the right web page. Also keep an eye open for error messages and server errors, by doing so you can prevent any issues once the redesigned website goes live.
Inform everybody that you are redesigning your website, give a date for when you switch over and make a big thing about the new design. The redesign can help promote your website further and all the fuss will be picked up by search engines such as Google who can then match up many sudden changes at once to a website redesign.
Step 4 – Testing
By testing the redesign out on one page to see if it gets positive results will help you work out whether your website redesign is going to be successful or not. Give a couple of weeks to review the results and if all goes well then the redesign will go smoothly.
Last but not least, if you feel your old design was penalised by Google, request for your new website to be reconsidered, while no immediate effects are apparent, over time you could find your website ranks better than it would if you had not made a simple request.
All there is left to say is Ape Web wishes all website redesigns the very best of success, if in doubt consult a professional.
This article was written by Ape Web.