A website redesign is a time for celebration! But if you recently redesigned your website without thinking about the effect on its search engine presence, you may be in for a rude awakening. Follow a few simple guidelines to be sure that your fabulous new site isn’t going incognito.

One question that we are asked over and over again is this: “I just redesigned my website.  How can I make sure that I don’t lose my search engine rankings?”

If you just launched a redesigned website, or you are about to go through a revamp, we’ve made this checklist for you.  Follow it, and your grand debut won’t become a search engine flop.

You Never Know What You’ve Got Until It’s Gone

How did visitors get to your old site? Knowing this will help you know where to focus your efforts when reclaiming lost traffic.  For a meaningful baseline, dig up this information about your old site:

• Conversions. Do you have any data on sales, leads, or other performance of your old website?  Make a note of it so that you can compare it against the new site.
• Search Engine Rankings. Did you track your old site’s search engine ranks? Is your new website targeting the same keywords? If so, you’ll want to keep a record of your old site’s ranks as a baseline. You can learn the best way to track search engine ranks in chapter 6 of our book, SEO: An Hour Day, and you can record your rankings on our downloadable SEO rank tracking worksheet.
• URL “Hot List.” What were the most visited pages on your old website? And, what were the most common entry pages (the pages that your audience come to first)? These pages will be your highest priorities for “cleanup time” tasks (we’ll explain below).
• Inbound Links. It’s important to know how many other sites are linking to your old website – especially if you’re changing URLs. While the previous tasks in this list require some recordkeeping before the new site is live, this is one you can do just as well after launch.  See our handy search shortcuts page to learn how to find out who’s linking to your site.

On the Day of Launch: Handle With Care

With key background info in hand, you’ll be in a good position to manage your site redesign with care. Here are some site launch best practices for a website redesign:

• Avoid Changing URLs. Keep as many of your old URLs as possible. Don’t change your domain name if you can avoid it!
• Page Redirects – Must happen concurrent with launch. In an ideal world, every URL from your old website would redirect to an appropriate page on your new website.  But we know that this can be hard to achieve in reality.  So try this on for size: using a server-side 301 setting (your IT people will know what this is) redirect the following pages, in order of priority:

1. Your Website Home Page (be sure you get all the variations – index.asp, index.php, or whatever you have)
2. Any Pages with Special Status (i.e,. Customer Support) That Make Them Important to your Business
3. Your Top Entry Pages
4. Your Top Most Popular Pages
5. Pages on the Path to Conversion (the pages that visitors often visited on their journey from entering the site to converting)
6. Any Other Pages on the Website.

Don’t delay this step – you need the redirects in place before the search engine robots come back and visit your site. And be sure, when setting up the redirect, that each page from your old site goes to a well-chosen landing page on your new site – not just the home page!

P.S.: Looking to go techie? Here’s a link to an excellent guide to redirects in all sorts of languages (PHP, .htaccess, Ruby on Rails and so on).

• Server Downtime. It probably goes without saying that server downtime is to be avoided; however, most reports we’ve read say that Google will come back again if a page fails once. Here are some tips if you’re moving your website to a different server.
• Internal Links. No website is immune to broken links – even your own. After a redesign be sure to run a link validator on your website to be sure that those internal links have all been updated properly. These are available online or using website development software (in Adobe Dreamweaver, for example, select Site > Check Links Sitewide).
• File Not Found Page. As a result of all the potential broken links listed above, your audience will probably see the “File Not Found” Page more often than usual after a site redesign.  Be sure it’s well written and explains the situation. (“To better serve our customers, we have redesigned our website” is good; “404 Error!  The URL you have typed is incorrect!” is not.)  Better yet, include links to those most-popular pages you figured out earlier.

After Launch

• Monitor 404 errors. After your new site launches, keep an eye on your website stats, so you can see if there are a large number of “File Not Found” errors showing up for a particular URL. You can also see a list of broken links at Google Webmaster Tools. Any pages with a large number of errors should recieve 301 redirects.
• Inbound Links. There may be dozens or hundreds of links all over the web linking to non-existent URLs on your website.  Each of these should receive a polite request for an update – but don’t hold your breath.  In our experience, less than half of these requests result in an update. If you’ve got analytics in place, you can review which links are sending the most traffic and pester in order of importance.
• Directory Listings. Really just a special case of “inbound links,” directory listings deserve a little special attention.  Take the time to submit whatever form you need to make sure that they are linking to the correct URLs.
• XML Sitemap. Today’s search engines are smart enough to follow a 301 redirect through to a new page and index it properly – with no loss in search engine presence.  How long will this take?  We’ve seen it take 3 months before an old site is entirely flushed.  Can you speed up the process?  Maybe. Some SEOs swear by XML Sitemaps for getting pages indexed quickly. We haven’t seen this in action, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt. Here is a helpful article on how to submit your sitemaps.

We know what you’re thinking: You worked so hard on your shiny new website, and just when you want to kick back and relax a little, we’ve created a substantial new pile of work for you. Is it worth it? Absolutely! You don’t want your redesign to turn away your most desirable visitors – people who are actively trying to come to your site! You could hand all this traffic over to your competitors, or you could identify your best sources of traffic, and take important steps to keep them coming!

Q: We have a blog at a free blog site which is well linked to and fairly well trafficked. I’m wondering how best to leverage the popularity of the blog to increase traffic to our company’s site. I’d consider incorporating the blog into the main site, but that risks breaking all of the existing links to it. Are there any other options?

A: Your situation is not uncommon – we often hear about folks who for various reasons have two websites and then want to merge them without any loss of page strength. Here’s our take on some approaches to this situation:

• Option (1) Move your blog to a new URL location on your company’s main website. Like any website move, this would be best if done with a 301 server-side redirect from each old URL to the corresponding new URL, so that links and search engine robots would follow through to the new address. Unfortunately, setting up a 301 redirect probably isn’t possible with your free blog host.
• Option (2) Move your blog to a new URL location on your company’s main website, but without a 301 redirect. This would unfortunately mean a loss of the built-up page strength that you have created for your blog. You would need to manually request updates to all links pointing to your old site, and cross your fingers. The up-side of this approach is that at least your future blog work will be integrated with the primary site. If it is a fantastic blog with loyal readers, you may be surprised that new links and references will build up quickly. (Note that in this option, you keep all old posts at the old location in archived form – no comments allowed – and then continue with new posts on the new location).
• Option (3) Keep the blog at its current URL location, but re-skin it so that it includes the global navigation for your company website (similarly add the ‘blog’ link to the primary website so that the navigation is seamless between the two). If this is possible on your blog provider, then this would probably be your easiest option.
• Option (4) Keep the blog at its current URL location and brand it with your company, link to the primary site, and periodically include posts that in some way feature your company.

Regardless of how you leverage it, a popular, respected blog is a fantastic asset to your company. Congratulations!

Q: We own a number of domain names that are fairly significant in our industry. Can we have these different domain names auto-redirect to our main URL without the search engines perceiving this as a trick? We are very honest people and don’t want to do anything that will be perceived as a trick, but at the same time we want to take advantage of these other domain names in case a user types them in directly into the address bar (we know this will not improve rankings).

A: This is a very common situation, and you should be able to redirect without any problems. Just be sure to set it up with a server-side 301 redirect (your webmaster or host should know what this is), and the search engines will get the message!

You might also want to read our segment on site re-designs in Chapter 11 of Search Engine Optimization: An Hour a Dayfor additional SEO redesign tips. And if you’re looking for advice on redirecting a domain after a website redesign, be sure to read “Oops, I Redesigned My Website! An SEO Checklist.”

And be sure to watch out for these potential problems:

• Duplicate content – make sure that you put all of your content on your main domain only; and
• Outdated Links – make sure that all links (both in your site and other sites) are pointing to your main domain.

By the way, a very similar situation occurs when you have a website that displays both with and without the “www” prefix (for example: http://www.yourseoplan.com and http://yourseoplan.com). In this case, the best plan is to use a Google Sitemap, which is a free service provided by Google that send the message to Google about which version of the URL is preferable. Here is a quote from the Google Sitemap guidelines:

“Preferred domain: Is your site available with and without a www prefix? Until now, the recommendation was to do a 301 permanent redirect of one to the other. But some people can’t easily do this. Now sitemaps has a preferred domain tool that lets you pick which you prefer. Make your choice, and Google will list the domain you choose. Behind the scenes, Google will understand the two domains are one and the same for purposes of things like link calculations. Keep in mind that Google says it will take some time before the changes are visible. Also keep in mind that you’ll still need to do 301 redirection for other search engines. “

Q: If our IT department wants to change the server that our website resides on, will this affect our search engine rankings?

A: A change in your server (which will be a change in your website’s IP address) or website hosting service does not need to affect your search engine placement. Just be sure of a few things:

• Make sure the website doesn’t go “down” for any period. Have all the site files tested and ready on the new server before making the switch.
• Do not change any URLs.
• Watch out for capitalization issues. Some servers are case-sensitive while others are not. If this is the case with your switch, then you should run a site-wide link check after the switchover to be sure that all links are working (here’s a free online link checker), and spend some time checking for inlinks from other sites and making sure that they are still functioning. If necessary, you may need to set up 301 redirects (your IT department will know what this is) from caps/noncaps URLs to lowercase URLs.
• Keep the old site files accessible on the old server for a period of time (some experts recommend a day, some a month) after the switchover. This will allow websites and search engines to update their caches.
• Test, test, test! After site launch, run a “site:www.mysite.com” search on Google and click on the links to be sure that everything is behaving just the way you – and your potential customers – expect. (see our Handy Search Shortcuts for other cool ways to search for your site)
• Consider possible issues with international SEO targeting.  Your server’s geographical location can be a factor; see Will an International Server Location affect My Google Ranks? for more info.

Here are a few other helpful articles on changing servers, hosting service, or domains:

• A 2003 article by Taming the Beast offers lots of great general tips on changing servers and addresses some specifics of moving hosts from one country to another.
• A very helpful and detailed posting from Google’s well known engineer, Matt Cutt’s, spells out the best practices for moving to a new web host.

We wish your site the best of luck at its new home, and don’t forget to invite us to the housewarming party!