Website Redesign: Has it affected your SE Ranking

[dante_casablancas]

Hello all,

Our company currently is in the midst of redesigning our website to help better our conversions and to target a new demographic. I just wanted to pose a question to the people who have done this before. Has it affected your SE placement? We are currently ranked in the first page for most of our important keywords. Has there been any instances that people have experienced here, where after they did a re-vamp to their website that their placement in the SE's have dropped?

I would also like to get some feedback for the people who have actually experienced the opposite, where their rank in the SEs actually climbed after the re-design.

Also what are the dangers and pitfalls to avoid, for anyone who knows, when re-designing a website that is already doing well in the Search Engines?

Any input or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[weslinda]

Well, a redesign should help, but if done improperly it could hurt. One thing people do when redesigning a site is to kill off all the content that used to be the reason they had achieved such good rankings in the first place.

I would be careful of a complete content and layout change, try and keep many of the same pages and information that has gotten you to the point you are at now.

You could work on simply changing layout, but ensure that you are focused on providing a well designed site, with more content than you had before, and you should be okay.

Issues can come when you completely change out the pages that can be accessed by visitors as pages are looked at individually by the engines and the new pages will take some time to get ranked.

Hopefully that helps.

[incrediblehelp]

I have done redesigns where the client lost rankings for 3-4 months and then were back on top. Then some clients saw a seamless transition. All were handle approximately the same. As weslinda has pointed out website redesigns can hurt or help and and it is hard to say what will happen until it is done.

One thing is for sure that you need to make sure you let the search engines know what is happening. If you are changing the page names, URL structure, file extensions, etc you need to do 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages. This is the single most overlooked step that usually causes downtime in the SERPs.

[dante_casablancas]

Thanks incredible...

Will research on the 301 redirects.

Does keeping the site structure, hierarchy adviseable when designing a new website? I guess if the page is being renamed, then a 301 redirect will be a good solution. But do the SEs prefer you keeping the current site structre instead of overhauling it?

[incrediblehelp]

Keeping it the same or improving it is best. If you are changing the URLs you might as well organize your website so it is better for you to work within and make better sense to your end users and search engines.

Check out the concept of building around theme pyramids:

Search Engine Theme Pyramids and Google

Optimizing Web Site Themes for Search Engines

Get Organized!
One of the best aspects of themes is that they'll keep your Website organized and on-topic, something that can become quite difficult as your online presence evolves and grows. A correct theming structure will help you maintain a clear delineation between the different areas of your site, and allow you to target specific keywords and keyword variations to particular sections. A themed Website should follow a structure similar to this:

* Index: Football Teams
* Second level: National League Teams
* Third Level: Different National League Team pages
* Fourth Level: Team Stats and Player pages for each team

[RegDCP]

I have done this a few times.
Before proceeding on the projects I did a thorough evaluation of the traffic patterns on the old site, took the pages with the highest volume of visits and "reframed the content" in the new theme.
In some instances the content was revised for SEO.

Old pages were kept in the navigation structure and anchor text.
Pages with very limited traffic were either discarded or used elsewhere in the navigation structure if I felt they were still relevant.

Positioning results were mostly upwards.

Reg

[obuwebco]

We re-launched obuweb.com may 1st.

With the new site came an entirely new site structure, new content, new verbiage, all new file and directory names. Even a slight reduction in number of pages. All we saved was blog content and a very old link directory.

We did 301's for every logical url. Even 301'ing an entire blog (with about 130 archived posts) from obuweb.com/blogger/ to obuweb.com/news

Net result from the 3 major SE's below.

Google: No decernable change in rankings
Yahoo: Huge increase in rankings (first page for "web design" from around page 18, moved up 40 spots to #1 for "professional web design")
MSN: Slight fall, maybe average drop of 3 spots per term.

Overall the re-design helped our SE traffic considerably. Best of luck.

[mpprh]

Hi

I updated the site and changed URL at the same time (around April 2005). I had had a holding page for the new site (with a little content and links to the old site) for about 6 months. I incorporated about 90% of the old content in the new site. I left the old site in situ for a while. You can see the difference here :

http://web.archive.org/web/200502080....netfirms.com/

http://web.archive.org/web/200406150...edoc-page.com/

http://www.the-languedoc-page.com

It took a few months for the new site to catch up with the old site. Then I converted the old site into redirects. I'd been working with redirecting links since day one with the new URL. The first site was a free URL, so I couldn't do more than HTML redirects.

The net result was that I used to be No3 on google.com (all languages) for my No 1 keyword. I've been No1 since November 2005 with the new URL (out of 15m - 45m references). Todays result : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...oc&btnG=Search

A couple of points :

Google is pretty clever at working out which site is the old one. The links, and cache reports here : http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...om&btnG=Search actually show results for the new site.

I moved from google PR 4 to PR 5 in the process. I think a large part of this (and the move from No3 to No1) was because the main keyword was uniquely incorporated in the URL.

I have lots of photos. Google image search was updated in the last month or so, providing lots of No1's. I'm getting good hits from this.

Wish I could sort out Yahoo & MSN search, too !

Peter

[marknc]

We redesigned our website and our ranking and position remained unchanged, actually we improved slightly on one or two keywords.
I think the key is to forget about the search engines, just write and create your site with the single purpose of reaching your target audience, stay focussed on this goal alone. When you're done, then you can review it in the light of the search engine guidelines and tweak it to fit.
Stick closely to the guidelines to start with, so for example, if they say include the same word a maximum of three times in the keyword meta-tag, then make sure you only include three and not four or five. If they say keep your h1 headlines short, keep them short. Sorry if I appear to be stating the obvious but you'd be amazed at how easy it is to overlook these small details.
We never did resubmit our site, just waited for the robots to come around, and now we enjoy first page number 1 positions on many of our keywords and phrases.
Once established you can to some extent, go beyond the limit of the guidelines but do so with caution at this time, as Google are on the warpath.
Watch for the tiny changes you can make to improve your position such as capitalising certain words or phrases, and remember, alt tags only show in Internet Explorer, not Firefox, Netscape or Opera, so use title tags as well to include important content and gain brownie points for accessibility.
Be clear about your USP and focus hard to reach your audience and the results will probably surprise you.

[RegDCP]

Excellent post marknc.
Design for your visitors while paying attention to what the serch engines want and you will get good results.
SEO in a nutshell.

Reg