My client is afraid that she'll lose search ranking due to a website redesign. It's her business website, and she is very concerned that any negative impact on SEO could put her out of business. I know and use basic SEO techniques, but I can't guarantee what impact the redesign will have. Here's my client's idea for how to handle it: 1) Use a different domain for the new site and run both the old and new at the same time 2) If and when the new one takes off (in search) we can shut the old one down Both sites would display the same logo/brand. And content duplication would be avoided as much as possible. My questions: is this a bad idea? and why? Thanks in advance for any feedback.
A new domain is not going to rank nearly as well as an aged one that has accumulated links. No comparison. So you need the existing domain. Sorry, I don't believe you have enough knowledge to pull this off. But if you are going to go through with it, keep the old site intact and be ready to revert to it should the rankings tank.
I agree with Oso, a different domain is not at all going to work. Google is definitely giving preference to specific domains in search results. Whatever you want to do, you need to do on current domain itself. You will definitely see little bit traffic ups and downs once google starts indexing the new site with the new design on the same old domain. Happened in my case when I switched to a simpler mobile friendly template. But if the changes are not too many, things will quickly resume. Try to keep the structure of the site as much same as possible. Like, if a menu is displayed on left side, keep it on left side. If you want to display it on right side, use CSS to do that, instead of moving the HTML code down. Also, don't think all negative. If a new design can hurt your ranks, then it can be equally beneficial too. May be your search rankings will improve because of a new and better usable design. Who knows? But I have to tell you, you need to understand SEO properly, cannot just make assumptions.
Redesign or rebuild? Redesign: same content, new theme, the urls aren't changed Rebuild: complete reorganisation, pages have new urls, internal links are all new Redesign: there's no real problem Rebuild: make sure you use 301/302 redirects properly. Make sure the new site is completely spiderable Tempting but no, that's not what you should do. You have new versus old, duplicate content, and confusion for the human visitors
Oso, thanks for the feedback. You are correct, I don't have enough SEO experience, but I had a hunch this was not the way to go (2 domains). I'm trying to build a case for not using this approach and just wanted some confirmation. Thanks again. JEET, thanks for the detailed info from your experiences, it helps! And yes, I'm trying to gain some SEO knowledge which is why I came here! Thank you for the feedback. sarahk, It's primarily a redesign, except fewer pages, and remaining pages will have same URLs. Redirects will be in place for URLs that will no longer exist. I was thinking the types of issues you mention could/would happen so I appreciate your comments. Thanks.
These days you can do a simple javascript redirect using window.location , and google will consider it a 301 redirect. No need to use htaccess or mod rewrite. Take a look here: https://searchengineland.com/tested-googlebot-crawls-javascript-heres-learned-220157 However, its still better to use a proper htaccess mod rewrite code.
If you learn site migration basics and implement, you can often increase your rankings. I actually expect improvement when launching a new site.