We are changing the design of one of our top ranking site. Almost all the urls except the homepage url will be changed. What SEO works should be done on this situation to avoid losing of ranking? Is there anything to do in the web master tools? There are some back links to these changing sub pages, should i remove or disavow them to avoid 404 errors? Or redirect these old inner pages to newer ones ?
No, For redirecting purpose you don't need to do anything with webmaster tool. But be alert while redirecting(301)... Redirect your old url to relevant page. eg: you old page was about "web design" so you need to redirect this old uRL to new "web design" page URL. This is the best way to avoid SERP rank fall. I'm sure this will help allot. Thanks
First of all, I would not change too many things at once. Ideally you want to update design, without changing URLs for starters. Anyway maybe this is not an option for you, so here's some tips: - You said website is ranking fine, so you definitely need to 301 redirect old URLs to new ones individually; - Make sure you have an updated sitemap.xml and robots.txt files and that they return no errors in GWT.
I keep reading redirect old URLs to the new URLs. I agree, but to be more specific, use 301 redirects.
qft. If you're deleting some pages altogether in favor of newer or expanded topics, install a plugin like Link Juice Keeper or DigiLinkDoctor to manage redirects and keep the incoming link juice.
Redirect is good advise if you aren't dealing with many pages. In my case, I had about 1000 articles that would need to be redirected. It just wasn't worth the time to me so I decided to just suffer the hit. I got massive amounts of 404s for a couple of months, but that seems to have leveled off now.