How to Revamp Your Website Without Affecting SEO
If your website has outgrown itself and needs a change in its overall look/design, you surely are in for a revamp. Since Google constantly keeps on making changes in its algorithm, it includes new ranking factors based on user friendliness etc. Your website needs to bring about renovation with passage of time so that it can adapt itself to new website designing trends and bring more user friendly features to its audience. Here are some ways you could revamp your website without affecting SEO:
Retain the same URL structure or use 301 Direct
Take a list of all the urls in your original website and save it in an Excel file. Make your best efforts to retain the same URL or use 301 redirects for saving the website from incurring a loss in traffic. If you change the URL structure of the website abruptly, you will also lose all inbound links and that could lead to a total disaster.
Conduct a 301 redirect mapping campaign so that you get your website’s traffic back. Execution of the 301 redirects is essential so that you don’t lose all your traffic. A major advantage of redirecting your website is that search engines will move all values of your inbound links from old urls to new ones.
You Need to noindex your Website
If you are in the process of working on a new web design, you definitely wouldn’t want Google to index it before you finalize it completely. Therefore it is critical that you noindex the website including all the web pages. You have a few options: if you have WordPress, check the box which says “Discourage search box from indexing this site”. You can also put “Disallow /” for blocking your robots.txt file. Any digital marketing company and elsewhere in the world should know all about SEO and web designing best practices to keep up with the latest trends of the industry.
Conduct an Inbound Link Analysis
It is very important that you should do a detailed inbound link analysis of your website before you go ahead with the website redesigning process. There are a myriad of tools available to help you in doing a detailed link analysis. You will be able to know the pages which contain the inbound links and also the sources from where you are getting all those links. In fact, there is a need to do an inbound link analysis of the website before and after the new web design.
Updating the Site Map
Avoid making the switch at once. Follow a phased approach in various steps starting with a small sub domain of the website. Once you have validated everything in that step, you can start moving the rest in baby steps, and ultimately transferring the entire website.
This definitely increases chances of success for the relaunch. You can do the transition all at once if you have a very big website and that will expedite the crawling process. After you launch the new website, it …