Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I don't know if this subject has been covered already, so appologies if it has been...
I have noticed that after a complete redesign of a site - the content remains the same - google wouldn't show me in the serps for several months. I have noticed it on 2 of my sites, so now I'm very reluctant to change anything in my other sites who are scoring pretty well in the serps.
Any ideas on this?
My question is: how far can you go in modifying a site without the risk of being 'sandboxed' by G?
cheers!
I believe that it is a safety mechanism in google to prevent domains being bought and used to capture the old sites ranking.
I believe that it is a safety mechanism in google to prevent domains being bought and used to capture the old sites ranking.
sure, but what if you do entire redesign of your website to make it easier and better?
it is stupid to have a part of new and a part of old redesign. i'd never buy from such site.
havent you changed your URLs?
Different background, different logo image, shifted the menu to the right side (it looks better and hey, it seemed to not impact this place), some content change (very minor in my opinion) and a lot of code cleanup.
We saw no changes as to the serps at the time, nor since. Being somewhat happy with where the site sits in most situations, holding steady wasn't a bad thang at all in my mind.
Did you by any chance "upgrade" from HTML to asp or php script? If so, session IDs will stop Google in it's tracks.
I have done many site re-designs but have always left the page names the same for any pages that were ranking well and have never had a site lose it's positions because of the redesign.
On my old static sites I generate the 'old' html pages from a db from scripts (asp/php whatever) - some of the pages are 8-9 years old - no way I'm giving them up.
it is stupid to have a part of new and a part of old redesign. i'd never buy from such site.
heh.. sounds like my site. part asp part php with a perl script to boot. No wonder my sales is so bad.
I'd put this type of error as probably close to the top mistake I see year in and year out. Easy to understand why too, it's very hard to do the rewrites correctly. And on asp shared hosting, it's essentially impossible to do those rewrites at all.
jenkers:
If you have pages that rank in the search engines then keep the page names / extensions the same.phpdude:
I have done many site re-designs but have always left the page names the same for any pages that were ranking well and have never had a site lose it's positions because of the redesign.mearts:
In Jan. we redesigned our entire site, kept the same file names and added new pages. We anticipated being dropped from Google and within 24 hours were gone.
Jenkes and phpdude seem to avoid the problem by sticking to the old name/ext, this is what I also do when redesigning. Being a SEO newbie, this was for me just "common sense".
I wonder why mearts had with this strategy no success and why he has even anticipated this whereas many others succeeded with the strategy of keeping the old page names and extensions.
Anybody to comment on this?
It is a bit more work at times to keep the old and new pages compatible, but since 1999 we have never dropped below #5 for the three or four major search terms.
Obviously this is not always possible, but it does seem to avoid the Google hit.
A little bit at a time is much safer than wholescale major changes.
I disagree, if your site is to the point you actually need major renovations and you understand the repercussions
just do it, no use messin around
Make sure you use 301 redirects in your .htaccess.
If you have a Google Sitemaps account, monitor for crawling errors and address them promptly.
Interesting replies so far.
The sites I was referring to are only about 20-35 pages and full of usefull info for a very specific crowd.
I had the last site on a server from my internet access provider using the free webspace they offered (url shaped like [user.isp.tld...] but recently registered a proper url and moved the site to a professionnal server. the serps for the new site where up to snuff in a couple of weeks, since I asked the linking sites to chanhe links to the new site.
I used a little php in the new design (just includes, no dynamic url's) and switched from html 4.0 to xhtml. The content is practically unchanged and the pages still have the same url's.
Since the move to a 'real' url I have a couple of incoming links from dmoz and 4 from wikipedia (4 different languages). According to the 'live pagerank extension' in firefox the PR has risen to 5 where it was only 2 before the move.
Still I'm doing VERY poorly in the serps :'-(
If so, this means that the urls for those pages cannot be the same, because now they all begin with a different domain name. And this is the principal challenge you now face with this domain. A search on these forums for "Google Sandbox" will return thousands of posts discussing this issue.
