Hi Guys, I have a pretty successful web site thats been live for about 4 years now. Time has come to relaunch a new design and im almost ready. My only fear is that i will lose my ranking/traffic because i have change the structure and page names. Any advice what i can do to prevent minimal loss of ranking/traffic? Have done the same thing before and used 301's and everything worked fine but that site didn't have much traffic where this site is MUCH bigger and very important. Looking forward to any suggestions/tips ...
Some good thoughts to be considered during redesign are available here http://www.zerohourcreative.com/web-design/website-redesign-considerations.php
yes - agree! but what is the best way to avoid the pitfuls? Anyone done this with there web sites? good or bad results?
In the past, I’ve analyzed my analytics program to first determine top performing pages. Once I’ve determined the top performers (I pay special attention to these), I’ll make sure that it has a counterpart and map the old ones to the new ones using 301. Of course I match content, title etc. as best I can. Hopefully Google will trust the new pages and rank equally. Pages that won’t be duplicated can point to the home page using 301. It’s always best practice to update your 404 page. Remember to update your analytics and robots.txt file and to contact/update anyone linking to you, especially to top performing pages – it’s a little work but worth it. And don’t forget about your outgoing links. In the end, you can expect your rankings to take a hit, if not for a few months. If you sell products, it’s best to implement everything off season. I’ve had good results with the above. But it’s still nerve racking.