The first thing any SEO thinks when a client says "I'm redesigning my website" is what impact will this have on all my work? In these events, often the client doesn't even consider telling their online marketing agency about the redesign until two days before launch.
This resource will cover how to do SEO checks on your test site/development site to ensure the structure, URLs, Page Titles, Meta Descriptions and more all match up properly. It also serves as an SEO checklist touching on things that are often forgotten when a website goes through a complete overhaul.
Why consider SEO in a redesign?
Why is it important to consider your SEO during a website’s revamp? In short, you have a lot to lose.
Let’s say your site’s doing great. Rankings are strong, organic traffic is flowing and revenue is growing. Do you really want to undo all that hard work? I’m guessing not.
However, by thinking strategically, you can take the opportunity to improve a site’s performance after a redesign. That’s what this client did:
As you can see, a steady increase in traffic followed (from the red circle) even during the re-indexing phase. If you do a redesign right, you won’t lose any traffic or rankings; in fact, you’ll gain them.
Below I outline some steps that can help you understand the test site being built and your current site from an SEO viewpoint. This is vital when changing your website around, and I will cover how to make sure the web development agency keeps the important SEO work that’s gone into your website.
Step 1 – Consider the SEO
The first thing you must do is think about SEO. Too often clients don't stop to consider the SEO impact of changing their website. They chuck away valuable content from historical pages or decide it would be a good idea to completely change every single URL without redirecting the old ones.
This only happens because they misunderstand how Google et al. read a website and how URLs hold credibility. It’s no fault of their own, but it happens.
Step 2 – Crawl the existing site
Why do I need to crawl my site?
If you don’t know what your site’s structure looks like now, you’ll set yourself up for a massive fall. Grabbing the structure, meta data and URLs is vital to identifying exactly what is changing and why.
How to do it
Your SEO crawl will give you a roadmap of how your entire site is currently set out. The best way to grab this data is to use a tool like Screaming Frog. Once you have the current site’s meta data and structure, you will know how to match the new site up.
Step 3 – Audit the old site
Next, you need to audit the site. Free tools like Woorank will do the job, but I strongly advise you to get your hands dirty and manually do the work yourself. There’s nothing like getting into the nitty gritty of your site to find any problem areas.
Why audit the site?
You need to know what search engines like and don't like about your site. This can help you spot any problems areas, in addition to enabling you to see which areas must be retained.
What am I looking for?
Here are some of things we check at Liberty. Sometimes it’s worth checking more, but these are top-level checks:
Using your Screaming Frog data, I advise checking the following:
- Missing page titles
- Duplicate page titles
- Page titles over 512 pixels
- Page titles below 200 pixels
- Missing H1 tags
- Duplicate H1 tags
- Multiple H1 tags
- Missing meta descriptions
- Duplicate meta descriptions
- Meta descriptions over 923 pixels
- Canonical tags
- Canonicalisation
- Broken internal/external links
- Image alt text
You should also manually check for:
- XML sitemap
- Robots.txt
- Duplicate content (do exact match search "insert content" or use Copyscape)
- Pages indexed by Google (do a site: command in Google)
- Site speed and performance (here's a tool to check)
- URL structure
- Pages indexed by Google using a site: command in Google
- Site speed and performance using Google’s PageSpeed Tools
This data gives you a good understanding of what the website’s doing well and areas for improvement.
Step 4 – Noindex your test site
Why do we need to noindex?
This stage is simple; yet it’s the point where many redesigns go awry.
If you’re working on your test site, the last thing you want is for Google et al. to index it. If you’ve added great new content, it will get indexed. Then when you launch the new site, the new content will have no value because it will be duplicate.
How to noindex your test site
A site can be noindexed in two ways by your developers.
1 – Tick the noindex box in your site's CMS. If you have WordPress, for example, you simply check the box that reads: "Discourage search engines from indexing this site."
This adds the following code in the <head> of every page:
2 – Your second option is to block the site in the Robots.txt file. This is a little trickier; hence, why most CMS have a box-ticking option.
If your CMS doesn't allow for this, you can put the following in your Robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
No CMS? You can manually insert the code if you have access to the header file by implementing the noindex, follow code as above.
Step 5 – Crawl the test site
Why should I crawl the test site?
You also need to understand how your test site is structured. Using a site crawler, crawl the test site again to see how it looks in comparison to your current site.
How to do it
- Open the first crawl of your current site and make a copy. Click "Save+As" and name the file "Current Site Crawl for Editing". This is your editable copy.
- Crawl the test site. Export the test site crawl and save it as "Test Site Crawl". Make a copy and name it "Test Site Crawl for Editing"—from now on we're going to use this.
- Take the newly created old site crawl (Current Site Crawl for Editing from Step 1) and do a find and replace on all the URLs in Excel. Replace your domain name: "example.com" with your test server’s domain: "test.example.com".
- Select all the URLs and copy them into a txt file (use something like notepad ++ or similar). Save this as the "Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog". At this point, you should have the following documents:
- Current Site Crawl (xls)
- Current Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
- Test Site Crawl (xls)
- Test Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
- Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog (txt)
- In Screaming Frog, locate the Mode in the menu bar and select List. The system will change slightly, and you'll be able to upload a .txt file to the crawler.
- Locate your txt file (Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog) of all the URLs you changed and pop that into Screaming Frog. Hit Start.
- If you followed this correctly, you'll end up with all the URLs being crawled. If it didn't, go back and make sure you didn't miss anything. You'll need to allow the crawler to crawl blocked/noindexed URLs. Simply click Configuration and Spider. Then you'll find a tick box that says Ignore robots.txt. You may need to tick this. On the same part in the tab called Advanced, you'll see Respect Noindex; you may need to un-tick this, too. It will look something like this:
Download all of the HTML and save it as an Excel file. Name it "Final Crawled Test Site". This will be the test crawl you’ll check through later. Also, hold onto the very first crawl we did of the test site (Test Site Crawl).
At the end, you’ll have these docs:
- Current Site Crawl (xls)
- Current Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
- Test Site Crawl (xls)
- Test Site Crawl for Editing (xls)
- Testing Crawl for Screaming Frog (txt)
- Final Crawled Test Site (xls)
Okay, you made it. Now you have the data in Excel format, and you can see what works on the test site, and what doesn't. This allows you to understand what's missing from the test site that is on the current site.
Step 6 – Analyse Your Data
What we're looking for
Now that we’ve done all the crawls, we need to open up the XLS spreadsheet called "Final Crawled Test Site" from Screaming Frog. You should see a lot of data.
First, delete the row across the top named "Internal HTML". Then do the same for number "2," if this is a blank row. You should have these headings:
- Address
- Content
- Status code
- Status
- Title 1
- Title 1 length
- Title 1 pixel width
- Meta description 1
- Meta description 1 length
- Meta description 1 pixel width
- Meta keyword 1
- Meta keywords 1 length
- H1-1
- H1-1 length
- H2-1
- H2-1 length
- Meta robots 1
- Meta refresh 1
- Canonical link element 1
- Size
- Word count
- Level
- Inlinks
- Outlinks
- External outlinks
- Hash
Some of these have the number "1" next to them, signifying that there is only one. If some of yours have number 2 next to them, then you have several of these. The elements you shouldn’t have a number "2" on are as follows:
- Title
- Meta description
- Meta keywords
- Canonical tag
- H1 (I’ll leave that open to debate)
With all this, we’ll begin identifying what changes need to be made.
Go to the Status Code header, click the filter icon and select 200 code. This shows all the URLs that are working. You might see "Connection Timed Out" on some of these. This could be because Screaming Frog timed out. Manually check these. If they work, just update the spreadsheet; if they don't work, then you’ve identified a problem. Let the developer know these are timing out. They should be able to identify a fix.
How to match up the data
I’ve told you how to test the data, but not what to do with all those crawls. The purpose of crawling your current and test sites in this way is to identify meta data, structure and errors the test site currently has. First, apply a filter to the columns:
Locate the Level heading, right click and sort from smallest to largest. Now segment all the data. I start with Page Titles (Title 1). Take the first 7 columns on the spreadsheet and highlight them all. Copy and paste these onto another sheet within the same Excel spreadsheet called "Page Titles". Do the same for "Meta Description", but this time pick the first 4 columns, then 8-10. Repeat this for each section to end up with the different sheets as follows:
- Page Title Sheet
- Address
- Content
- Status code
- Status
- Title 1
- Title 1 length
- Title 1 pixel width
- Meta Description Sheet
- Address
- Content
- Status code
- Status
- Meta description 1
- Meta description 1 length
- Meta description 1 pixel width
- Meta Keywords Sheet
- Address
- Content
- Status code
- Status
- Meta keyword 1
- Meta keywords 1 length
- H1 Sheet
- Address
- Content
- Status code
- Status
- H1-1
- H1-1 length
- H2 Sheet
- Address
- Content
- Status code
- Status
- H2-1
- H2-1 length
- Canonicals, Word Count, Level, In-links and Out-links
- Address
- Content
- Status code
- Status
- Canonical link element 1
- Word count
- Level
- In-links
- Out-links
This number of sheets may look like overkill, but in my experience working with smaller amounts of data is much easier than trying to work on one large, data heavy spreadsheet.
Here's the best bit
Remember all the crawls we did before? Well, we’ll need to go and open Current Site Crawl for Editing. Filter the Level first so it shows "smallest to largest", then locate the following columns on this spreadsheet:
- Title 1
- Title 1 length
- Title 1 pixel width
Highlight all the data in these three columns and copy them into your test site spreadsheet onto the Page Titles Sheet in the empty columns. Place those three columns apart from Title 1 Pixel Width.
Now that you have the test site’s Page Titles next to the current site’s Page Titles, you can highlight the duplicates. Highlight both Title 1 columns and go to Conditional Formatting > Highlight Cell Rules > Duplicate Values. This will highlight everything that matches.
I have no shortcut for this. You’ll need to manually move things around and get them in the right place. I go about this by looking at the Page Title 1 closest to the left, (the one from the test site) then copy the text. Use the Find and Replace box (ctrl+F) to search the text. Hit "next" and go to the next match, where you'll grab the three relevant columns and stick them next to the text you copied. Then repeat.
Sometimes nothing will match. When this happens, try doing this:
- Search a few words.
- Remove the brand at the end or beginning.
- Check if there is a | or - in place.
- Check for apostrophes.
- Check for misspellings.
These are a few things that may cause issues with matches, so be sure to check yours with vigilance.
Rinse and repeat
After you’ve done this process once, you’ll need to rinse and repeat for the other sheets to match up all your Meta Descriptions, Canonical Tags, Word Counts, etc. It’s important to remember that the point of checking these areas is to ensure that any changes are good changes.
Once you’ve nailed all 200 codes, you’ll want to look at the 404s.
Go to the Status Code header and select 404 on the filter icon again to find URLs that aren’t working. This is assuming you have 404s.
This will give you a list of all the URLs that didn't work. In theory, it should give you everything else that needs to be checked. You should only have 200 status codes and 400 status codes, but sometimes you will have 500s or 300s that need further investigation.
404 time
If the URL is a 404, it means that the page doesn't exist. So we’ll need to do one of two things:
- Create this URL on the test server.
- Redirect the old URL to the test server’s new URL.
Here’s an example of a 404:
Look at the test server’s URL. If you think it needs to redirect, highlight it in red. If you have to create a new URL, fill its cell with the relevant meta data and highlight it green. Don't forget what each colour means.
You'll also need to highlight the corresponding URL that will redirect to the new version on the Current Site Crawl for Editing.
What do to with live URLs that aren’t on your current site?
These URLs are most likely new pages. Like with any page on your website, it has to be optimised correctly. There are tons of guides to help you here (this visual guide is my favourite).
Now what?
I'm glad you asked. Now you have a fully comprehensive spreadsheet of everything needed to minimise the damage of moving a site. You need to work closely with the developers to get the changes you’ve recommended implemented. With the spreadsheets laid out in this way, you can simplify the data and give the developers the bits they need, making their lives easier.
Don’t forget, when you redirect pages to a new site, you’ll lose around 10%-30% of your link equity. But you’re giving search engines the best opportunity to bring over your old site’s strong reputation.
From this point onwards, I’ll detail things that can go wrong, common problems, and important elements to check along the way to monitor the changes.
Now you've given the new URL structure and changes to your developers, you need to check they've got it right. You’ve been involved in several meetings discussing the strategy to proactively make sure you don’t upset the rhythm and have a positive impact on the changes. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t stop there.
You’ve more than likely been handing over changes periodically and testing as you go. Now, it’s a good opportunity to test everything again.
Crawl the test site again—being vigilant in cross-referencing all the relevant meta data and ensuring that the URLs match up. If they are even slightly off, then change them. One way you can check is to use "find and replace" in Excel. This time, swap the test.example.com with example.com, then crawl the URLs with Screaming Frog.
From now forward, make it a habit to check these additional elements.
Step 7 – All the additional checks
Rank check
Why do you need to rank check?
A rank check measures how the site performs for a host of keywords in search engines. You’ll use this data as a comparison for the newly launched site. If things change, you can react and identify the problems when you check the results.
What to look out for:
Big movements. If a keyword jumps from page 1 to page 20, you may have a problem. Look out for any big or unusual movements by checking these things:
- Did the URL change?
- Did you change the meta data?
- Has the page lost all its content?
- Is there a redirect in place?
- Does it have a noindex tag in place?
Content
Don’t delete anything you don’t have to delete. You might think your old blog posts aren't needed, but they are all adding to the credibility of your site. Without these blogs, you'll lose a chunk of value.
Similarly, now’s not the time to change your landing page content if you’re currently enjoying decent rankings.
Analytics code
This is pretty self-explanatory—make sure you place your analytics code back in the <head> section of the site. It is important to check the ecommerce tracking, goals and event tracking if you currently have those in place.
Unblock the site
It's time to check the new site to see if it's allowing search engines to index it. Simply follow the reverse instructions of blocking the site. Whichever method you used to block it, do the reverse to unblock. Failure to do this could create big problems when you launch the new site.
Summary checklist
Here’s the checklist I mentioned earlier. If you skipped to this, then use it as a guide to help you do a redesign with SEO in mind. With this in your arsenal, you never need to fear a website redesign again.
Think about SEO from the start
Crawl the current site
Audit your existing site
Stop the test site from being indexed
Crawl the test site
Find and replace URLs
Crawl those swapped URLs
Check test site meta data on live URLs
Check 404s on test site
Map out 301s
Optimise all new pages
Check implementation
Do additional checks
Launch!
Common problems to look out for
Each scenario will differ between websites. It’s important to understand how this foundation approach helps segment and break down important meta data so you don’t lose SEO value during a redesign.
As with any project, there are common problems SEOs, businesses and developers all come up against:
- Communication—This is the big one, which is why it’s first on the list. We all know how important communication is, and lack of communication is at the center of most problems associated with web redesigns. Right at the start, have your SEO in the initial strategy meeting with the web developers or anyone else who has an obvious connection with the website. From there, keep the lines of communication open.
- Missing meta data—Crawls can be fickle endeavors. You cannot afford to launch the new site with missing information. If you force search engines to guess what they should be putting there, the ensuing results will not be to your liking.
- Missing Content—All too often, content isn’t given the credit it deserves. Take the time to get the right content in the right places on the new site.
- Failure to implement redirects—This is a very important step. After you’ve laid out the redirects, it’s vital they’re put in place and work as planned.
Additional resources
Once you've checked these elements, you are in a strong position to launch. It's still important to keep a close eye on the performance of the new site. Sometimes a single line of code can upset the rhythm.
Here are some additional resources to reinforce what we've covered here:
Search Engine Journal –
Website Redesign Disaster
Search Engine Watch –
Website Redesign: Re-launching Without Losing Sleep
Moz – Site Redesign - Checklist for Online Marketing
One last thing…
As with any changes to your website, it is important to monitor the situation. Use whatever tools you have available to keep a close eye on the following:
- Rankings
- Organic traffic
- Indexed pages
- Webmaster Tool errors
These things will help spot any problems. If you notice your rankings plummet, you can quickly investigate and make any needed changes.
If Webmaster Tools reports errors when Google tries to crawl the site, then you know to be proactive and explore the problem.
Once you are confident there are no issues, loosen up a bit. You don’t need to keep such a close eye on these things. You can work on promoting the site and carrying on with your growth and maintenance SEO work.
Give me some feedback
How do you approach a site move?
Do you have any cast-iron techniques you recommend to maintain strong rankings during a move? I’d love to hear from you.
Hi Richard, thanks for this. Great guide!
Having done such audits before, they usually ended up as massive (still useful) Excel docs. And clients don't necessarily understand them really.
One little thing I would add is the sense of priority of what has to be fixed/amended, and perhaps a PDF to go with that big Excel doc as a summary, easier to digest. Your checklist is very good for this!
Hi Anthony,
The PDF is a good addition with added priority levels to different sections. That would certainly help on the client side. Glad you enjoyed the guide.
It's important to know that
2 – Your second option is to block the site in the Robots.txt file.
is not sufficient.
The meta-tags are the important part. If you skip those and only use robots.txt your site could still end up being crawled. See here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/robotstxt
Thanks for your comment. You're right this isn't the preferred method, which is why I put that as the second option. If that can be the only way of doing it then it will help safeguard against it. But like you said not the ideal fix.
I've always preferred to password-protect a dev environment to prevent it from indexing, rather than using robots tags or files - which aren't always followed by the search engines. That is just my personal preference though.
To change all design of a website can be dangerous, but the key is to conserv the same URLS used in linkbuilding tasks and to conserv the same content from the website. Remenber, the design can not be indexed from Google yet.
I'm agree. I changed my URL pattern recently and I had 2 days with some problems redirecting to the new URLs. I lost important SEO in my blog for a week and now I'm raising up again... Very important :-).
Great post Richard!
Hi Ruben,
Sorry to hear you had problems but glad you're back on track! Definitely keep changes to a minimum in terms of the structure that's where most problems occur!
Glad you liked the article thanks!
Hello Richard Foulkes,
Really Great Article, This is what I need!!!
I thought to redesigning my website to alter the fortunes of websites And trying make a proper step to take care from the SEO aspect before redesigning my website. Now am going to follow your step and going to redesign my website, thanks for this useful article.
Cheers!!!!
That's aweseome! thanks for the kind feedback. Hope my steps really help you avoid any disasters!
Your steps didn't really avoid a disaster. Cough..Glenn Gabe..Cough
Sometimes is totally necesary to change the design of the website. One of bigger problem is the SEO. To change the design can shut down all SEO ejecuted actions. Be careful.
Quite excellent guide.
Just one note for citing a couple of tools that make life easier, especially for everything related to duplicated content.
In fact, Screaming Frog - as well as Deep Crawl - are useful only for discovering a limited case of content duplication (in Screaming Frog URLs having the same hash). More problematic is finding the so called "substantially duplicated content", that occurs because of thin content or because of pages (i.e.: product pages) which have more things in common than differencies.
When redesigning a web site, it would be great to correct also that kind of problem, so to not inherit in the new one.
Good tools helping in discovering pages affected by this issue are the Moz Crawl (a Moz tool that should need some more love by us SEO, IMHO) and Siteliner.
The Moz Crawl (you can use Moz Analytics or just the Moz Crawl Test if your site is small) should be thought as a tool showing you patterns of duplication more than something showing you all the URLs having duplicated content.
Siteliner (https://www.siteliner.com/) is the same as Copyscape, but expressely thought for analyzing content duplication in a single web site.
Hi Gianluca,
Great points, I would definitely recommend using a whole host of tools when you look at redesigning. I'm a big fan of siteliner it's great for finding internal duplication that you can't always get hold of using the Hash method you mentioned!
I agree with the smaller duplicate content, It can be really tricky to find. Especially in product descriptions etc so using those tools would definitely help.
Thanks for the ideas!
I am a huge fan of both deep crawl and screaming frog I must admit I'm partial to deep crawl don't forget to call the back links using in my opinion Moz, Ahrefs & Majestic. upload them to deep crawl making certain you know what links to what download that as a CSV or one of their 4 fantastic formats use it when you're new website is about to be launched now you can map out all the back links and be certain to kill redirect chains.
One thing I would've talked about is Security, DNS & hosting, its nice to see clients move to a quality hosting company in addition to web speed the uptime and I don't consider hosting without failover quality so tools like dploy.io & mover.io are awesome when it comes to keeping 2 websites synchronized. Don't forget if you can update from PHP to HHVM the speed is worth a lot to the end-user especially if using mobile device.
Security is crucial as well you can run companies like FireHost or you can add your own WAF like Sucuri Incapsula WAF combining that with extremely High-quality hosting and allowing failover and load balancer or DNS you really get your client to a better place. It is not as expensive as you think to run Sucuri with flywheel, kinsta, Pagely web synthesis just to name a few for DNS can add DynECT, NSONE, UltraDNS, AWS route 53 and DNS made easy for quick failover. You can create a powerful server and rest easy at night knowing it will be secure on and up.
all the best,
Tom
Hi Tom,
Those are great add ons, I never considered the security or hosting when I was putting these steps together. I certainly will now as you're right they can influence the performance of the site. If you can take the opportunity to speed up or make the site more secure it's definitely worth looking into.
Thanks for the comment!
Rich
I just want to add that to prioritize your efforts take help from your webmasters and Google analytic, pull down the list of URLs which are actually sending in organic traffic to your website (and check other channels too), I normally take care of all the steps as mentioned above but don't waste time on urls which haven't received any traffic from past 90 days, in an old website sometimes list of URLs crawled is very high, but on close analysis you get to know that maximum traffic is coming from top "X" no of urls.
I prioritize and work on them first and then according to time and resources concentrate on others if necessary.
Great idea, if you're stretched for time then that is a good way to streamline the priority. My guide is sort of an 'ideal scenario' which lets be honest we often don't get. So drawing on other information like links and traffic can help you concentrate on pages that have value, especially if you've got budget or time constraints.
Hi Richard Foulkes, thank you very much for sharing this post. Its really helpful and help us better in maintaining the website as well as the content.
You have focus main point of seo ( Your point is )
What am I looking for?
Here are some of things we check at Liberty. Sometimes it’s worth checking more, but these are top-level checks:
Using your Screaming Frog data, I advise checking the following:
You should also manually check for:
I am very important thing found your post thank you very much.
Hi Atiqur,
Some of those are literal so for example where I say 'missing page title' you're looking for the missing ones in order to add a relevant and optimise title tag in place. For others like Canonicalisation you're making sure that best practices are in place and the you're using the different elements in the correct way. So not spamming your Alt Text of the images with keywords or not having a sitemap in place etc.
I hope this helps! Generally you're looking at best practices to keep everything inline with SEO but also what feels natural.
This is a very thorough guide, thanks for sharing! It's always a little scary when a client decides to redesign their site. The key is planning. You're right- if you find out right before (or after the process started) it's not fun!
301 Redirect link equity loss mileage may vary.
"Don’t forget, when you redirect pages to a new site, you’ll lose around 10%-30% of your link equity. But you’re giving search engines the best opportunity to bring over your old site’s strong reputation."
Early last year I redirected our blog's URI architecture to remove the date. No content, design, or meta information change - only the URI and every single one redirected to a new URI (the exact same URI actualy, minus the date information) and we saw a huge drop in organic traffic (screenshot) . We waited a few weeks, thinking it was just taking time to index, but when traffic didn't start climbing back to normal I tried swapping our two most popular posts back to the original URI's with no luck. We're still working towards growing the traffic back to the levels it was at before the 301 redirects.
All that to say, just be careful when approaching this massive of a change - the traffic doesn't always come back. Very thorough post Richard! I'm keeping this bookmarked for future redirect/redesign work.
Hi Daniel,
That's a really interesting situation, there's never any guarantees I guess that's the nature of SEO. Even these steps won't necessarily save everything they just give you the strongest chances, among others of course! I hope you get back the traffic you lost too.
Rich
Hi David, any updates now a year later on your recovery from the URI changes? I am currently managing two site migrations and it would be really helpful to know.
Thanks for the great guide. Good timing as we are currently changing our websites for the new year.
No problem Evan!
Best of luck with the redesign.
good post richard, i'm very helpfull. Thank's Richard
Oh man this is intense!. I never knew how much could be done before a new site launch.
There's tons more as well!
Great write-up! Excellent point about noindexing the website while you're working on it. Something a lot of people miss!
I always find the same thing it's often the development company that just don't realise the importance of no indexing the test site. Which can really harm your SEO right from the start of the redesign.
Really Knowledgeable stuff! Evergreen!
Hi Richard, this is a great timely article for me and my team. We are currently updating one of our client's website. This article will help us to cross check and making sure that we are not missing on anything that could impact SEO down the road.
Thank you
Alex
Hi Alex, Best of luck with that clients website and I'm glad my guide has helped!
Rich
I've redesigned my blog sometimes and I didnt improve my SEO. Sometimes I think it's better to do nothing and just write more and more articles.
:(
Thank you! This was a very useful post
Thanks for this. Great guide!
Hey Richard Foulkes,
It's really nice article and very helpful for me.
But I have a small query, when your tags are not updated for HTML site or others, where not seeing in search engine but you had applied then what you need to do to see a tags in Google search engine? @Richard Foulkes
Please advise with strong solution if you have or found any.
Thanks.
Hi Ramesh,
Whilst you might not see yourself ranking strongly if your site is unique and has value to it you'll be somewhere in googles index. So when you come to make changes to the site it's important not to change too much. Once you've moved to your new platform or you'be updated the website then you can look at re-optimise the site stronger for keywords it's important to make minor changes if possible as your site will have value to it.
Rich
First of all congrats for your post, I would like to know that for our experience is very important audit the old site by yourself in order to understand the posible improvements.
This is a great check list, not only for redesigns but also very useful for building brand new websites. We've implemented it into our own launch check list and it's certainly helped with quality control.
Hi Lee,
That's awesome so glad you've found this useful and you decided to implement it into your own processes.
Rich
Super list of how to work through a re-design. The hardest part is to advise an impatient client that it's an important process, and that by not doing this part right, they will destroy any progress that has been made previously. Too often I find the client is gung ho to launch a "brand new" site, and they just do not understand that all good things take time. Thanks for sharing.
Excellent guide, everybody should read it.
This is an exceptional guide! Definitely planning on using some of this going into 2015. Thanks a ton Richard.
Hi Patrick!
Thanks for the kind feedback glad you've found this useful
Rich
The information is complete and very useful. Good work !
Awesome post, this will help!!
Nice guide Richard! Having discovered Screaming Frog recently but never actually tried it, I will be more than happy to give it a go.
Having rebuild several large 2000+ page sites recently, the outstanding point fro me is to get your redirects in place as soon as possible and to monitor Google WMT's for errors so you can fix them asap should they occur.
We like to switch sites in stages, design first and then change the content once the site has settled down in SERPs. It takes longer but you keep control of the whole process.
jmueller, traffic by (google) images is super important for some clients but sometimes we can not redirect all images (time, money, etc.).. so I keep the old images folder to maintain the links of references and we had a great experience doing that.
Nice post. I have gone trough your items one by one. How about updating keywords? Once a time I have updated my page keywords. A week later my page rank was drop drastically. Is there any correlation on it? Or could be something else.
Thanks for the comment!
Updating your keywords is a tricky one, if you find those pages no longer bring you traffic then it's worth investigating. In terms of dropping in Page Rank, again it's tricky Google are somewhat unreliable when it comes to actually updating Page Rank. It also depends what you use to measure it.
I'd be more concerned with the fact that if you update your Keywords you lose traffic then Page Rank. As that's far more important.
Rich
All art is theft, eh?
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/how-to-avoid-se...
I'd wholeheartedly disagree with that characterization. As part of our YouMoz submission process, our editing team vets every post for existing content. If you're curious about details, we'd be happy to provide them, but it's telling enough that this post is now 3,600 words compared to the 2,000 in the other, and was actually whittled from over 6,000. They cover a similar topic, yes, but there's no concern of plagiarism here.
We've had an extensive conversation over email with the author of the SEJ post this morning, and have made a couple of small changes to this post as a result, but we absolutely stand behind it.
If you'd like more information, please feel free to email us: editor (at) moz.com.
and the author of the SEJ post now says that he will not be writing for Moz again. So I guess that conversation did not go so well.
I really feel sorry for him, I really liked his article here on Moz about the Panda updates. @Moz, you guys should get him back :/..
This is ridiculous.
Rule no. 1 for writing on YouMoz: Please submit your own original work. <- it isn't original
Rule no. 3 Observe any copyright or usage restrictions regarding images, obtain permission for use, and cite the source of your image. <- he used Glenn Gabe's screenshot
How did this post ever made it to YouMoz and was even promoted to the MozBlog?
This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community.
The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz.
This should be:
This post was originally in SearchEngineJournal, but we copied it because it provides great value and interest to our own community.
The author's (Glenn Gabe) views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, but we copied it anyway...
I am not bashing on Richard, but this should have been corrected by Moz.
Rule no 1. Please submit original content - You will find that no content within this article is duplicated or copied from any other source unless cited. Naturally the context will be similar we talk about the same task. I was actually inspired to create this from various talks, events and pre-existing guides one being Glenn's. I have not copied, stolen or regurgitated his work. I actually wrote my steps based on a project plan we perform for clients. Of which I'm sure many SEO's have followed something similar for a long time.
Rule no 3. Observe any copyright or usage restrictions regarding images, obtain permission for use, and cite the source of your image - I used Glenn's image, I used it because I felt it was valuable to show readers what was done before so I also linked to it. I class such as the correct way to cite the source.
The issue isn't the content, the issue was the title I really liked Glenn's article but I felt I could write something that not only explained what you're looking for but what to actually do when you find it. My content, in my view a is clear and thorough guide, other readers clearly agree. The title has now been changed, the image has now been removed. Moz vetted the content meticulously and I applaud them for standing by my piece. They appreciate I enjoyed his content but they also appreciate I made something unique and detailed. Otherwise it would not be here.
"obtain permission for use, and cite the source of your image"
"My content, in my view a is clear and thorough guide, other readers clearly agree."
No, I really liked the article, till I saw Glenn Gabe wrote the same thing. I think you really wanted to use the word "redesign" in your title, but that would have made it too obvious.
Everyone could have done this, I don't blame you, I blame Moz.
You've missed the point I rasied, the content is not the same the steps here do not exist elsewhere. I learned some key things from Glenn's article and a whole host of others. Things I was already aware of and have talked about. I took them and compiled them into my steps. I'd challenge anyone to write this content as I have. It took several months to even get into the YouMoz if I had of copied the content it would of took no time at all to get here.
I did not want to use the word redesign in the title because harming your SEO can happen regardless of a redesign. Maybe you're moving to a new CMS or even a new web host you can still destroy your SEO. This guide helps you think about your SEO whether it's a small change to the website or a substantial one.
We strive in our industry to create the best content, I've taken ideas, tasks and context from others naturally as they are necessary steps needed. I've refined them and created something unique is that not why we are all in SEO to take great content and make it better?
"is that not why we are all in SEO to take great content and make it better?"
You took it, that's what I don't like.
oh and if it wouldn't be an issue to take great content. Why did they say this:
"We've had an extensive conversation over email with the author of the SEJ post this morning"
Something isn't right.
not that it's any of my business but I do not think that it was plagiarism I think he stated the facts these are some of the things you must do in order not to lose rank during a migration. Unfortunately no matter how we phrase them if the directions say bring water to a boil in order to complete recipe and I wrote bring water to 212°F or 100 C do you think it would be plagiarism? my analogy wasn't great but not following these rules will cause problems if you try to do a redesign this is simply doing what anyone in their right mind would have to do to prevent their site from being damaged.
I don't think it's bad that being correct and is not copy and paste I don't know how else this could have been done without stating incorrect facts.
just my $.02
thank you so much for taking time and writing the post good for beginners like me!
Good article, for which much thanks. Like many, I have bookmarked it for future use!
Thank you for the detailed guide. The process should be the same you mentioned. It is common fact that some redesign bring curse for the business and some bring benefits. This depends totally how you develop the whole process and executed the steps into the process. The website should be properly tested before launching the new design. Because it takes much effort to make a authority or trust of a website and we can't let it go for the cost of redesign.
Thank you for the related post mentioned. I must say they are great.
Excellent post and a great guide to follow when redesigning a site.
Thank you!
Thanks Gary! Appreciate the feedback
Great tips. I recently did a site redesign where these best practices where not followed....it did not go well.
Hi Dean,
I'm sorry to hear the redesign didn't go to plan! Hopefully my guide will come in handy when you come to do your next one!
Really great and useful tip.But it takes time to get back our site.
Thank you - this is so helpful! I often get questions from other bloggers worried about a drop in traffic after a site redesign, and it's been hard to find a good, easy to follow guide to refer them to.
That's not a problem. I'm glad you've found it useful!
Thanks for the great article. I actually should consider providing our clients' IT guys with a translation ;)
One of the most important tools to get an overview of checklists when relaunching a website and minimise those nasty tons of e-mails is having a good task management tool at hand that is both used by you (if you're a consultant/an agency), the client's IT guys and the client themselves, just so they know what is going on and can be sure that something is being done about any upcoming issues.
I would definitely recommend a project management system or task management tool. We use one here in house for every project we do and it really outlines everything for eveyone involved. Makes life much easier!
We currently have several clients who are in the staging phase of their new site. I am so glad I stumbled upon this article! I use Screaming Frog constantly, but was having issues with staging sites. Your guide helped me solve that problem.
One thing I do is check as many internal links as I can. We have had clients, who have created their own content, have their internal links directed at the wrong pages or have really bad anchor text. This is just something to beware of when auditing the content before launching the new site.
Your checklist is a great thing to show the client to help them understand the process as well. Thank you!
Hi Tory,
I'm glad my guide helped! That's a great point whilst it's important what the content says it is also important what it links to. I'd always recommend crawling the site one last time and manually go through as much as possible to see if anything breaks or goes to the wrong place
thankyou richard for the helpful article,it fulfilled all aspects that are needed to be taken into consideration when changing your website.
Yes, and I would to add that all this aspects are very important to check sometimes even in an already placed website :-). Thanks Richard!
Since you are adding a noindex tag, preferably on every page in the header, why would you have crawlers follow the page? Wouldn't it be best to have noindex, nofollow?
Hi webtheoria.com, that's a good question!
In my opinion I wouldn't be concerned with nofollowing pages. It's far more important that even if search engines land on the test site it, they don't index it.
Nofollowing the pages will mean search engines follow the links but don't pass any SEO value, so as these are test pages they have no real value yet anyway. So it shouldn't cause too many problems. That's how I view that anyway.
Hi Richard,
Thank you for this document. I'm working at a large website which is just changed / moved without any SEO thinking. I made a list similar at your document as a strategy for building SEO into the changed site.
Important is to show how the site is ranking now, and after the seo upgrade.
Although i don't have acces to the old site anymore still trying collect data from arhived pages and see what we can use or at least redirect them to the new pages. For this i use way back machine, here i got a good insight of all the old pages still exist.
Regard, Leonie
Hi Leonie,
I'm glad this has helped best of luck with the project.
Gotta give a shot out to Screaming Frog - an old tool that continues to keep its relevance! Great write-up and thanks for including so many free/inexpensive tools to help manage the SEO aspect of a redesign. A+ !!!
Screaming frog is a great tool it continues to get better. Glad you found the guide useful!
Great blog post Richard! You covered everything well and also included one of the best tricks:
I ALWAYS do this and for a small site migration, I go through all the pages to make sure they redirect properly. For large scales sites, I do a sampling. The prep time is the most important, closely followed by post-site moninoting and fixing any issues asap before losing any traffic because of a drop in organics and etc.
Also, great trick Leone. I often keep the old site on another server and do the host trick to quickly help migrate any content that is needed post-launch.
I always find myself performing site: searches. Nice tip to keep the old site on another server have to remember that one!
The site: command is good, but remember that in not that precise at all when it comes to huge sites.
Excellent starting list, I would also recommend to check change in site structure and coding. Moving pages around, adding new sections to the website, removing old posts can have a big impact on current rankings.
Not to forget the impact of adding or removing code. Think about new plugins, pagespeed, changed heading and content structure.
@Leonie: you could also use link data sources like MajesticSEO for that. They do have a list with old URLs in their databases.
Hi Jan-Willem,
Thanx for for the tip!
Hi Jan-Willem,
That's some great points. It's important to take into account the code changes as I mentioned in the post one line of code could cause some serious problems. But also adding a handful of new plugins could slow down the site. I guess some of this falls in between SEO and Web Development but definitely worth checking!
Richard,
Your suggestions on noindex go against an article Google posted regarding website testing. The article is a couple years old but I wanted to see if you had reasoning for going against it or if the technology has just changed?
The link in question: https://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/08/website-testing-google-search.html
Hi Berdon,
The link you refer to talks about A/B Testing and Multivariate Testing. The article you mention is the right way to handle testing across the site for example if you made changes to sign up buttons and wanted to test which one works best. This article tells you how to handle that.
My guide is aimed solely and changing the website in it's entirety, whether this be a site migration or new design. It's there to help handle the structure changes so you don't lose your sites credibility. I'd recommend using your article for A/B Testing though!
Hope that helps!
Thanks for the reply Richard. What would you suggest if we are making substantial changes but want to A/B test during roll out? Still follow suit with Google's suggestions or leverage yours?
I'd follow my guide and the other resources for purely the website changes but incorporate Google's guidelines when it comes to A/B testing. It might be tricky to do testing whilst rolling out.
Mainly because it makes more sense to roll out completely then test once you've launched the new site. That's how I'd recommend approaching it.
Richard, thanks for putting together such a comprehensive guide; completely understandable and actionable throughout.
Hi ChristianPrime,
I'm glad you've found the guide useful!
Nice guide Richard, but I would say changing the structure of website would result in a slight up or down in traffic flux because every link on the structure plays its part as far as proper link juice and navigation is concerned. Point is, all the steps you mentioned are no doubt excellent but the change in organic traffic is what one should still expect after making changes on a website
Hi Salman,
Glad you like the guide, I agree that in most cases there can be fluctuations in organic traffic. Naturally because you've made so many changes and the more you make the more Google and the other search engines have to re-index and crawl. But I've also seen cases where very little has changed when a redesign has taken place. The traffic itself didn't fluctuate but it depends on the circumstances. So it's definitely worth setting expectations for the client so they know traffic may or will change uncontrollably sometimes.
Hello Richard,
I enjoyed your post, hope I would get it before a month when I have lost all SERP result because of website's redesigning. Anyways, I have bookmarked your post for feature concerns.
I always redesign my website, If I have dynamic website like e-commerce or Q&A site. I maintain 301 redirection for old content. And truly speaking I never did like you mention above. I will try what you have said.. thanks for sharing.
Glad it's helped I definitely recommend using as much of my info as possible. But use plenty of other resources too as the more information you have when you go through this sort of process the better!
If Google is planning to measure Title and meta description in terms of pixel, then what should be the pixel size?? Is Google official released an update on pixel size??
Hi Karen,
The change came when they wanted to make using Google the same across multi-devices (I believe) and they haven't released anything officla (I believe) Screaming Frog have tested it and have given you guided figures/best practices.
Page TItles over 512 pixels
Page Titlles below 200 pixels
Meta Descriptions over 923 pixels
However you can't control the pixel width if certain keywords get bolded. So always be wary of that if you have longer tail keywords in the Page Title consider how, if they are bolded, it affects the length/pixel width.
Hope that helps!
Deleted
Really it’s wondering! You are sharing really great post. All information is helpful for us.
But, not enter any information related to image (like image alt).
Excellent guide.
Redesigning is a good strategy to attract more new visitors on the website, but, neglecting SEO while redesigning may lose your old visitors.
Thanks!
Exactly right redesigning might get you more business, conversions and sales. But if you neglect the SEO ultimately you'll lose a large chunk of it!
Richard,
Great post. Thanks for sharing!
Glad you found it useful!
Thanks Adam
A very timely article Richard,
I am just wrapping up the design phase for our new websites responsive look and feel, and have emphasised time and again the need for trying to keep the SEO elements and strategy stable, as such I have already implemented many of the checks you have kindly shared above. By planning the sites new design to fit around, exisiting site content and architecture I hope to reduce any potential impacted of the new look damaging our SERP positions.
Some of the additional points you have raised will now be looked into.
Thanks for sharing.
Tim
Hi Tim,
I'm glad you've taken such care with the redeisgns it's great to see. Thanks for taking onboard my other suggestions I hope the launch goes well!
Rich
Very helpful article. Thanks
Not a problem glad it was helpful!
Step 4 is probably the most common error we see. Almost every client we get we're contacting their previous developer to take down the development site they still have indexed.
thank you so much for taking time and writing the post good for beginners like me!
Crikey that list is huge!!! Definitely one to print out and refer back to time and time again, great stuff!! x
Hi Richard,
That you for the checklist, I have a question though, I am have a live site https://ifixscreens.com, we made a new design on a development server https://igadgetsrepair.center. Now that we are done with the development site, we want to migrate the REAL domain (ifixscreens to gadgetsrepair) to the development server. Will this way affect my SEO by any mean, also I changed a lot of the inner page URL structure? Removed products from my shop page. Do you have any checklist for such a movement? Please advice?
[Links removed by editor.]
Hi there HebaS! Since this thread is very old, I'd recommend asking your question in the Q&A, where you can chat with SEOs about your question and where you're much more likely to get an answer :) Thanks!
hi, does the nonindex tag also apply to wordpress drafted pages? Draft is not published online so search engines shouldn't reach the page anyway, but just to double check with you.
Thank you Richard; it helped me during my revamp :)
Great topic of interest, above all for those new to the world of SEO, ever needed to update the site, it is important that you do not lose our website position in search engines, people always look for the redesign to attract more people, but on the other side can lose important people who are readers of our blog or website if things are not done right.
For those who do not know maybe it gets a little difficult at first, but all work for the welfare of our business will bring fruit.
Step 1 - Consider the SEO this says it all, thanks.
Hi Richard, this is very good, but for us newbies, would you consider making a video about the steps? Thanks.
Thank you for this guide, it's detailed and thorough!
great informative post and thanks for it.
Hey its great tips you shared thanks for it.
Hi Richard,
This is a great article about what to do when redesigning a site. The first site I did was crashing, outdated and falling apart at its busiest time. We redirected all traffic to the new one and made it as fast as we could, but it was seriously rushed on everyone's part. Wish we had more time to plan, but I will definitely bookmark this article for next time!
Thanks!
Kristina
Hi Kristina,
It's always a big problem having the time to implement all the SEO elements needed during a redesign, I know from my own experiences! Glad the article has helped and hopefully it will help in the future too.
Rich
Hey,
really an Great Article! Thanks for this!
Peter
Hi Peter,
Thanks I'm glad you enjoyed it!
nice blog Richard, Really useful information for us.
Deleted
That's a great point it's worth noting who is linking to your blog posts, use tools like Moz or Majestic to show you the top pages (ones that have links) so you don't lose the valuable content but more importantly the links!
Deleted
Great additions! It's so difficult to stress the importance of keeping old, historic pages as sometimes clients can't see the value in a blog post thats 10 years old but I agree with your points.
PS: Thanks I'm not quite as good with a football as I am with SEO ;-)
Good Post !!!
Good to know these steps to not destroy the positioning of our website that has cost us so much to get.There are many things to keep in mind that this does not happen. The last time I tried to change the design of my website, I had some problems. Luckily I was able to fix it without hurting my page.Every day I learn more about this great blog!
Thanks for sharing this useful information with us.
Not going to lie, this is a little over my head. Any recommendations on a person or company that would be able to do this for me? We are actually in the middle of a redesign right now and I want to get it right.