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Google ranking of redesigned site

by Shmigola
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello,
I hope this forum is a right place for my question. I have a law office as a client that wants to do a redesign of his existing site. He wants to add CMS also. This site is 11 years already and it's design is very archaic. But the site is ranked in Google very-very high (first page in search of main key words). My question is: how to keep this exellent position of the site in Google with new version of design and CMS?
Thank you.
#google #ranking #redesigned #site
  • Profile picture of the author MatthewWoodward
    Hi,

    Once thing that you can be 100% sure of is when you launch the new site the rankings will bounce around like crazy for a while.

    What you need to do is a full SEO audit on the current site, and then carry out the same audit on the new site and make sure there is consistency across them both.

    Try to replicate the current ranking pages in the new CMS as closely as you can.

    Also be sure you don't introduce any potentail problems such as duplicate content or anything that might trip Panda.
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  • Profile picture of the author spanisheye
    The two most important things to do are keep page urls the same and keep the internal link structure the same.

    I'm assuming the content will carry over as will the on-page SEO.

    In other words, you can change the look and feel of the site but just make sure that from a crawling perspective, Google will still discover the pages in the same way it did before. If you change this, it can get messy if you don't know what you are doing.
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  • Profile picture of the author prismkuet
    Keeping the same position for the redesigned site will not be an easy work. As in time of developing new one in place of old one, you will lose the back links. It is not an easy on to change the site without changing linking structure. As per my understanding, you need to set up a long work plan for the site and need to work in small scales and try to track the links as well. It will be a big challenge. You should discuss with the matter with few expert SEO service providers.
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    • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
      Originally Posted by MatthewWoodward View Post

      Once thing that you can be 100% sure of is when you launch the new site the rankings will bounce around like crazy for a while.
      That is absolutely not true. You can do a redesign of a site with no ranking change whatsoever. There might be some slight fluctuations depending how drastic of a change this is, but bouncing around like crazy? Only if you have a really ****ty designer do the work or if the site goes completely down for long stretches of time.

      Originally Posted by spanisheye View Post

      The two most important things to do are keep page urls the same and keep the internal link structure the same.
      Definitely important.

      Originally Posted by prismkuet View Post

      Keeping the same position for the redesigned site will not be an easy work. As in time of developing new one in place of old one, you will lose the back links.
      There is absolutely no reason the site should lose a single backlink.


      You need to keep the URL structure, the internal link structure, title tags, and content as close to the original as possible. The URL and internal link structures should be pretty much identical unless they have a horrible navigation menu that you are cleaning up to make more user friendly. If they are updating the site, they might want to make some pretty significant changes to the content to bring it up to date, if that is the case there isn't much you can do except to explain to them that it may have an impact on their rankings, either positive or negative.

      For site redesigns, I usually try to look at the text-only version of a site. This is what Google sees. I try to keep the text-only version of the new site as close as possible to the old site. You can completely change the look and feel of a website without altering the text-only version very much.
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