There comes a time in every SEO's life where you might decide to redesign your website. This article will cover some common search engine optimization mistakes you can make when redesigning your site and how to avoid them.
The following are possible events that can occur as part of a site redesign process:
Changing the web publishing software for example if you are using Blogger and you switch to Wordpress. Or if you are using Joomla and you switch to Drupal, vice versa.
Changing the URLs of your website if your website is using query strings (/example.php?id=9) in the URL, you might change them to shorter URLs with keywords in them for a more SEO friendly approach
Changing the look and feel of your website this pertains to changing the site themes and layouts.
Changing the domain name for branding reasons there are also occasions that your team needs a new domain name for marketing/branding reasons.
Changing the server side scripting technology of the website. A common example is a migration from ASP.NET/MS SQL server database to PHP/MySQL or vice versa.
Changing the entire protocol of the website from HTTP to HTTPS or vice versa.
All of these events can affect the SEO status of your website. Most often webmasters/ website owners are not fully aware of the site redesign consequences and as a result it drastically affects their rankings in common search engines such as Google. They lose a lot of traffic after a site redesign which also means lost sales and income.
This tutorial will outline the best practices of doing site redesign in any of the above events. This will ensure that it wont affect the long term SEO improvements/status of your website.
Mistake #1: Not doing a complete backup before redesign
Forgetting to backup a website is a serious mistake. Suppose you decide to redesign your website and you do not have full backups. What can happen is that you make a serious mistake that could make your website inoperable - your website backup is the last resort to undo the harm you caused.
Correct thing to do: Before doing any site redesign, ensure that you have carefully backed-up all of your website files, content and databases.
Make sure you have tested and double check your backup files. Keep a local copy and make several copies of it as an archive of your past website design.
Mistake #2: Not preparing an exhaustive list of old content URLs
In a major site redesign (such as changing your CMS, layout or web technology), your old URLs can get altered. The main purpose of having a complete list of old content URLs is that you will be going to check these URLs if they are 301 redirected correctly to the new URLs. Without a list, you will fall risk to duplicate content or even 404 pages and broken links on your old content URLs. This results in massive loss of traffic and seriously affects your website SEO status.
Correct thing to do: Run a crawler on your old website before doing any site redesign. The purpose of the crawler is to grab the old URLs. Make sure these are the active and canonical URLs of your website content. Do not include the URLs with session ID as they are not considered canonical URLs by Google.
You can use Xenu crawler: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html to dig your site URLs and export them to an Excel spreadsheet. After the site redesign, your next task is to check if these old URLs are 301 redirected properly to the correct/updated URLs. You can use this bulk server header checker: http://bit.ly/h9MEjO for doing this check.
Mistake #3: Redirecting entire URLs to the homepage of newly designed website
This is another serious mistake because if those old URLs are ranking in Google, the search engine can no longer locate the corresponding new URL. As a result, the ranking will drop due to lack of relevance.
Correct thing to do: You should ensure that each old URL 301 redirects to the corresponding new URLs.
Also it is important that the header status of the new URL is 200 OK header status and should not redirect again to another URL. Common issues found include a never ending redirect loop that can cause serious onsite SEO issues.
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