Search Marketing Blog
Don’t Re-Design Your Site Out of the Search Engines
Yesterday, Kevin Delaney at the Wall Street Journal, published an article titled “How Search-Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing“. This is a tremendously valuable article for all online businesses engaged in a re-design (or considering a re-design) of their Web site.
Recently, several of our EngineWorks clients have put frantic calls into our Natural SEO experts with horror stories of losing prominent listings due to their new site re-design. As noted in this Wall Street Journal article, it is extremely important to consider the repercussions of newly re-designed pages, and new site URLs, upon organic search listings.
There are recognized tactics that you can implement to ensure that your new site pages get rapidly indexed throughout the major search engines. The first step is to perform an evaluation of the link equity associated with your original URLs. If these existing URLs have a substantial number of in-bound links, or high Google PageRank scores, you should strive to use them with your new site pages.
If you choose to use completely new URLs, the most effective strategy is to alert the search engines, at the server level, that you have moved your site pages. This process is known at as implementing 301 re-directs.
Another important step to perform, prior to going live with your new pages, is to contact any “authoritative” sites that may have been linked to your former site. Asking these sites to update their links to your new pages will help re-establish your in-bound link relevancy score.
Finally, once your newly re-designed site has been created, it is paramount that you re-submit a new XML Sitemap to the search engines to ensure that all of your new pages are identified and easily accessible by each algorithm.
It is important to remember that the search engine algorithms need to be able to find your newly re-designed site in order for customers to find your listings in relevant search results.
Importance of an XML Sitemap for your Re-Design - EngineWorks 04.28.2008 at 9:55 am
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