Anita Pinkerton
Preserving Traffic During Site Redesign
In the past year I have worked with several clients who came to us to do their SEO after they redesigned their sites. (Ideally, an SEO expert should be engaged at the beginning of any site redesign process, but that is a topic for another day.) During the redesigns, content on the sites dramatically changed. New content was added, some content was moved to new pages, and some was deleted. However, during this process, the companies overlooked a few steps to help preserve their traffic and ended up experiencing drops in traffic that could have been curtailed. Granted, whenever you redesign a site, there will almost always be some fluctuations in traffic, but there are things you can do to minimize the impact:
- Map old pages to new pages. Don’t do a default redirect of all pages from the old site to the homepage on the new site. As you are building the new site, map pages from the old site to the new site so that you can redirect the traffic from those old pages to the appropriate new pages. (I use 301 redirects in the .htaccess file on most of my projects.) This helps to preserve the page rank of those pages and provides a better user experience by ensuring that visitors to the old link will find what they are looking for quickly.
- Run a W3C Check. It’s easy to do a quick test on your site for W3C compliance. I use W3C Log Validator. This will help identify any coding errors, broken links, or missing documents that could deter engines from fully spidering your site. It’s simple to run a check, but fixing the errors may take a little time. Definitely do this step before you submit the XML sitemap to the engines.
- Generate and Post an XML sitemap. As soon as the new site is launched, make sure you generate and post an XML sitemap on the site and then submit it to the major engines. For Google, submit the sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools. Ideally, the URL for the sitemap should be www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Spiders will eventually find your site, but this helps to jump start the process and ensure the engines are getting the most accurate information about your site.
These are just some of the steps we take during a site redesign as part of our SEO services to help preserve a site’s traffic. If any of you have other tips and suggestions for our readers, we look forward to your comments. Happy SEO-ing!
