Website Redesign without Losing SEO
To do a website redesign or not to do a website redesign? That is the Question.
Websites need to be redesigned periodically. Some of the reasons include:
- Change the website look
- Rebrand
- Update and switch to a new mobile responsive theme recommended by Google
But the Question often arises: Will I lose my SEO when I redesign my website? That is a possibility. But not if you take the proper steps to ensure you will not lose your website SEO. The following steps must be taken for a successful site redesign without losing SEO.
When redesigning your website, there are a number of things to do to make sure that your rankings and SEO performance will not be negatively affected.
- Set up the new website on a temporary URL
- Don’t index your test site - Google does not crawl a temp site
- Crawl site and create a list of all pages from your OLD website pages, links, structure
- Audit the old site
- Descriptions, tags, keywords, images, titles, alt tags
- Crawl new site and compare to old website
- Descriptions, tags, keywords, images, titles, alt tags, Pages, links, structure
- Analyze and compare the old and new websites to match up your data
- Create page-by-page 301 redirections to redirect old URLs to new URLs
- Search engines won’t consider the new pages as different pages
- Points all old page links to new pages
- Transfers old URL to the new website
- Redirects search engines to new URL
- Ensures that all old bookmarks, social media and links will work with new website
- Reinstall Analytics codes
- Unblock site
- Switch to the new website and submit to Google (all at once) Google’s recommendation is to do it all at once since this will expedite crawling.
- Verify new website with Google Webmaster tools
- Use FETCH AS GOOGLE to check that Google can properly read the new website
These are some of the steps we take at Penguin Suits to assure that our clients’ ranking in the search engines grows with the work Penguin Suits performs on their websites. We never want our clients to lose search engine ranking. If you have any questions, or need some help, please let us know. Penguin Suits would love to help you with your successful website redesign.
