Is Redesigning An SEO-Established Website a Death Sentence?

[kIwOk168]

Greetings everyone, I have an established website that I want to redesign. Basic SEO stats for the website are:

• PR4
• 278 ranking keywords on a localized Google based on SEMRush
• 661 backlinks based on backlinkwatch
• 175 indexed pages on Google
• Domain registered 2001

So based on the stats it's safe to say that the website is indeed established right?

As with how most other website started, I didn't really started this website with SEO and conversion in mind. So now that I am made aware of the wonders of SEO and conversion, I want to redesign my website to maximize conversions (and just to make it look better).

Now that I am planning the redesign from the ground up, I have these specific questions. Any information from our established warriors would be highly appreciated and I hope the newbie warriors would benefit from these lessons.

• Would removing the "image content" affect SEO? How about changing the "title" and "alt" tags?
• Ideally each old page has a corresponding new page right? But that's not the case here. I have ~257 pages in the old site, but I'm trimming it down to ~154 pages in the new site = ~100 pages unaccounted for. Can I 301-redirect multiple old pages to a single old page? i.e. old website has /item1-quote.html, /item2-quote.html, /item3-quote.html and I plan to redirect them to a single /quote.html page.
• Should I maintain the content as is? What if I move around content blocks (i.e. paragraphs)? Would that be bad? Basically, I'm projecting that some paragraphs blocks would be maintained but would change order in the source code.

Basically that's it for now Any additional tips on how I can make this redesign less painful would be highly appreciated.

Thank you very much.

[avatar9812]

You will see huge fluctuation definitely by modifying title. That is the most important one I would be careful with.

[Sabrina178]

give it 2 weeks and your rankings will be back to normal again

[xylement]

Designing shall not be a huge matter... i once migrated from blogspot to wordpress and all url are changed. i have like 6k post that time. It took me like 2-3 months to recover back to previous traffic and adsense earning =x

[kIwOk168]

Originally Posted by xylement

Designing shall not be a huge matter... i once migrated from blogspot to wordpress and all url are changed. i have like 6k post that time. It took me like 2-3 months to recover back to previous traffic and adsense earning =x

2-3 months to recover back previous traffic and adsense earnings IS a huge matter The goal is to do a complete redesign and experience the least amount of SEO ranking changes and recover at the quickest time possible.

[kkchoon]

I have done redesigning few established sites, and the key here is properly redirect all your existing urls to your new url: How To Keep The Old Site's Traffic When Redesigning New Site?

[imdomination]

I've done it before with sites that were converting terribly. I was ranked second for a keyword with xx,xxx exact searches/month, getting tons of traffic but no sales. I decided to take the plunge and completely redid the website. I dropped off the map for about 2 weeks, then came right back where I was before.

I only changed the content though, I didn't change the site title (did change the titles of individual pages though)

[kIwOk168]

Originally Posted by imdomination

I've done it before with sites that were converting terribly. I was ranked second for a keyword with xx,xxx exact searches/month, getting tons of traffic but no sales. I decided to take the plunge and completely redid the website. I dropped off the map for about 2 weeks, then came right back where I was before.

I only changed the content though, I didn't change the site title (did change the titles of individual pages though)

2 weeks seem to be the consensus on how long the websites would regain their backlinks.. Thanks for this info