Making a Major Website Update

[hotshots]

Our Website is now at the #1 Position on page one of Google, for 10 important keywords searches and we want to make a major Website update to take advantage of these high page position rankings. If we make this major up date will we lose it all? If so how can we make significant changes and not lose our new high page position rankings?

[too much information]

What kind of changes are you talking about? A new look, different content?

[hotshots]

Hi and thanks for your reply. It would be a major new look, better organized, same theme, basically the same textual content with some placement changes, better grammar, same keywords in about the same locations as the original, better optimized keyword placement, some new new content added, same pages, same names, things just arrange in a new fashion and new images The site looks much better and focuses on the theme much better.

[Bentler]

If you focus on rewriting/changing appearance but keep the filenames and themes of your top pages you should be OK.

If you do a significant Web tear-out, the update will probably damage your rankings or at least create a competitive opening.

[hotshots]

I think what we have done would be consider a big change so we are going to put a super nice image ad on the index page to tell people about our new Website and send them over there. We have another domain that we can use for the new re-design. We will then start making controlled changes to the existing site over a period of time until we have included all the chances that we want, that should minimize the shock to any search engine, especially the one we are most concerned about. What do you think of that plan? And thanks for your help.

[pmkpmk]

Nooooooooo! Don't use a new domain!

Use the same domain (unless it is a freehoster like geocities), and set up "permanent redirects" for ALL old pages to the new pages.

With a new domain, you have to start all over again!

Instead, you could set a permanent redirect from your NEW domain to the old domain, so oyu could use the new domain name for print advertising and email.

[too much information]

completely agree, use the redirect instead of changing the domain name. It would be a big mistake to turn your #1 ranking page into a doorway page for a new domain.

[hotshots]

I don’t think I explained what we were considering ver well and what Ithough we could do so we could get use out of our new re-design without taking a chance of changing the original site and possible losing our #1 rankings.… let me try again.

The original site that has the # 1 rankings is the site we wanted to make the major update to but I am afraid to make the big changes for fear of losing our #1 ranking for each of our major keywords. What I though we could do as a temporary solution, is to keep the original site as is and insert a well design, attractive banner that would say…. “If your are looking for these special widgets please check out our new Website”, of course we would say it much better than that. The idea would be to drive traffic to the other website that has all the changes we had planned for the original site, as a temporary measure until we could make the changes to the original site a little at a time, until we have made all the changes we had planned to make, then we could discontinue the temporary site as there would be no reason to continue sending visitors over there.

Too bad we just can’t make good changes to our Website without endangering our ranking positions.

[pmkpmk]

OK. Even so, I think you should not do it that way.

We had a site which ranked for our keywords on average in the top-3 by organic growth and a little bit of white-hat SEO. We made a major (and I mean major) relaunch during Decmeber '03 and January '04. The complete site structure changed, all URL's changed, title tags changed, layout changed - everything changed.

I sat up virtually hundreds of permanent redirects in our server conf - then we switched overnight from the old site to the new site.

What happened? In terms of SERPS - nothing! We stayed (and still are) within the top 3, for the most important keywords #1 or #2.

And that is what I would suggest to you too. Develop your new site internally, once you're done, implement redirects for ALL pages, and then switch to the new site at once.

[hotshots]

Thanks much everyone for you help and suggestions...... I will do my homework and seriously consider your suggestions.