Maintaining Search Engine Visibility During and After a Site Redesign

Companies may decide to launch a site redesign as part of a rebranding of their business, a shift in their product lines, or a marketing makeover, or for a variety of other business reasons. During a site redesign, any number of things may change on the site. For example:

  • Content may move to new URLs.

  • Content might be eliminated.

  • Content may be changed.

  • Content could be moved behind a login.

  • New sections may be added.

  • New functionality may be added.

  • Navigation/internal linking structure may be changed significantly.

Of course, the move may involve moving everything to a new domain as well, but we will cover that in the next section, “Maintaining Search Engine Visibility During and After Domain Name Changes.” Here are some best practices for handling a site redesign:

  • Create 301 redirects for all URLs from the original version of the site pointing to the new URLs on the redesigned site. This should cover scenarios such as any remapping of locations of content and any content that has been eliminated. Use a spreadsheet similar to the one we outlined at the beginning of this chapter to map out the moves to make sure you cover all of them.

  • Review your analytics for the top 100 or so domains sending traffic to the moved and/or eliminated pages, and contact as many of these webmasters as possible about changing their links. This can help the search engines understand the new layout of your site more rapidly and also provides better ...

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