Website Redesign and Google Impact

IMO you should update the current site.

I would suggest NOT creating a "new" site... you are just asking for issues down the road, and in essence you would be starting over at square one with Google. The question I would ask is what is it you find to be "clunky"?

I think the key is not just keeping the domain url the same but keeping ALL the posts and pages urls similar.

If familybusiness.com/great-post/ turns into anything else like familybusiness.com/catagory/great-post/ you will lose all your backlinks and rankings to that post. You could do a lot of 301 redirects but that seems sloppy. I have never worked with bitnami but if you can keep all your page and post urls exactly the same and you put the same content on them, why would you lose any indexing or ranking?

Starting a new website would increase your risk of losing website's ranking positions for target keywords. Because when you change your page, meta and content structure there are possibilities, if not properly handled, it can negatively impact the website's SEO and affect the long-term growth of the site. Also, there is a huge chance you might create 404 pages and duplicate contents etc.

But its not always the case, when one of our client decided to create a new website since the previous one was owned by his former business partner. We carefully, redesigned, created the exact pages URL, contents, metadata, and manually redirected them to the new one. We were able to maintain the rankings and ranked more keywords. If you want to start a new website make sure you carefully do everything right. Good luck!

Update the site and apply 301 redirects (from old pages to the new pages).
Your rankings will stay the same or might get better if you add more info.

First, there's no such thing as a Bitnami website. I am assuming you will go for WordPress for the website update. You are essentially updating your website.


Ideal options to update websites:
* Retain old URLs as much as possible
* Any change in URL should be properly redirected to the new one using permanent redirects
* Deleting old webpages and creating new URLs essentially means a new page, with NO ranking. Update old pages instead

If you temper with anything on the old website, the Google search engine will not tolerate it at all. yes, you can redirect it to your new pages by 301. This will not decrease your website ranking.

If you redesign your website carefully and take some necessary steps which are important to make sure that you don't lose anything from the process of redesigning.

1. Keep all the URLs structure as it is. If they are not properly optimized, you can rewrite them but after that, you need to do 301 redirections of every old URL to the new URL.
2. Keep the current content and make it more useful by adding some graphics, statistics, videos or anything which can help you to increase the credibility of the page.
3. Make sure that your redesigned website loads faster. It should load within 2 seconds. However, if your current website is taking 1.5 seconds to load, your new website must load before 1.5 seconds so that Google can't find any website speed issue which can affect your ranking.
4. You should not alter the title and meta description of the current website and should take care of heading tag, alt tags, image names, anchor text, etc. These are some of the vital aspects of On-page SEO which hampers website ranking.
5. Make sure that there are no broken links on the redesigned website.
6. The structure and navigations of the website should be SEO friendly and User-Friendly where people can easily identify the different sections of the website and find their desired information easily.
7. User lesser inline CSS and Javascript and transfer them in external .css and .ja files respectively.

I hope this information will help you to redesign your website without losing any SEO value.

Design website, but do not delete any content, do not change URL...if you do this...will get trouble.If the article is old and optimized as you told your father was seo guy...then that must have ranked...if you delete them you will lose ranking and revenue as well.

I saw one great emerging microjobs site ..completely out of market after such stupidity