Launch a redesigned website without destroying your SEO
Imagine you are doing a redesign on a gigantic website and you may or may not be doing some SEO for later down the road. As a responsible web developer you probably want to ensure that the client does not start to question why, all of a sudden, their search engine traffic dropped off the side of a cliff.
If you can preserve URLs as they are, then fine, there’s probably is not too much to worry about. But when you create a whole new URL structure and you’ve got a lot of pages, Here are a few basic steps to ensure that the website launch goes well. It is probably not the BEST way, but it is the SAFE way.
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Take a note of all indexed pages.
To do so, simply check with Google, using the parameter, site:www.reallyridiculouslygoodlookingwebsite.com . Make sure to show all supplementary results as well so that you have a more complete list. If you are using the SEO plugin for Firefox (http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html) then you’ll be able to download this list as a .csv file. Nice.
You can also go through the website’s html or xml sitemap for a list of its URLs. Have fun doing that.
Figure out what new pages to point the old pages to.
Go through your new sitemap see what the list of new URLs is (hopefully you have control over the naming of these) and what each content is on each page. Match up each old page with a relevant, new page. Sometimes this can be easy if the general structure of a website is staying the same, and sometimes can be more tough if things are really being moved around.
Create the necessary 301 redirects via your .htaccess file.
This can be more or less easy depending on what you are working with.
If you have regular pages, with not too much info, it will look something like this:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.php http://www.website.com/prettynewpage
If you have a ton of parameters at the ends of URLs, your rewrite might look something more like this:
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^youroldcategory_id=223423&youroldsubcategory_id=52355$
RewriteRule ^youroldpage.php$ http://www.website.com/yournewcategory/yournewsubcategory%1? [R=301,L]“Noindex, follow” your new pages for the time being.
Upload the new pages along with your .htaccess file. Test your old pages by going through your list and making sure each page redirects correctly. Allow any URLs that are unaffected by the redesign to continue to be indexed as they will be the ones that will help notify SE’s that some of your old URLs are being redirected elsewhere. One such example is your homepage.
Take off the noindex and let your new pages be crawled freely.
Wait for the search engines to take into account your new URLs, then unleash them out into the wild. This will reduce the risk of “DUPLICATE CONTENT FAIL” to a minimum.
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What a great post. Never used the “Noindex, follow” tip, might just have to try that.
I guess the key phrase of your entire post is “As a responsible web developer…”. We’ve worked with many that are not and don’t care to be. It’s tough to tell the client, but they need to know.
We’ve touched on this topic as well – Don’t Let Your Developer Trash Your Search Engine Rankings.