Woried about losing ranking after redesigning site

[Clay Wimberley]

Im currently redesigning my company's web site. Our current site hits the top of the search list for most of our important keywords. It's a small market and we make unique products so this is not an extremely monumental acomplishment, but we do seem to currently edge out most of our competition when it comes to search engine ranking. I'm worried that after completely redesigning the site we'll lose our rankings. How can i defend against that?

[bunltd]

If you're truly just giving a new design to an existing site: one of the easiest things to do is to maintain your current page file names and navigation structure, using the same titles etc. If you can't or aren't able to do it this way, then be sure to provide a sitemap, and an informative 404 page.

LisaB

[RicoFlan]

I've been through this a couple of times with travel & tourism sites, where ranking is key. In simple rebuilds, the previous post is correct: Keep those page names and URLs the same. However, if you are changing technology (moving from .asp to .aspx or from .htm to .php, for example), then you have no choice - the URLs change. This is a real nightmare and clients get SUPER tense about this one -- no matter how much you warn them.

Things we've done that have helped:
(1) creative use of htaccess and robots.txt to re-direct spiders and make sure things get indexed quickly
(2) maintenance of existing pages with a re-direct on them to the new parallel pages (helps you keep from losing people who bookmarked your site)
(3) vigorous re-registration of the site

Another nightmare arises when you have a significant number of inbound links: Hit that email! Get people to update ASAP.

Hope this helps...

rico!

[Clay Wimberley]

Thanks for everyone's help. I have another question remaining. I'm planning to change service providers but keep the same url. Will that be a problem? Does the search engine care if the IP address changes even if the url stays the same?

[ntrance]

I dont think the IP matters at all.

We changed from html to .asp recently and redesigned the whole site in to the bargain. We dropped from ranking 7th for our 2 main KW's down to as low as around 25 for about 3 weeks. Interestingly, our old site really wasnt SEO'd at all, but had just developed over time. The new site was SEO'd from start to finish.

We've just returned to the front page at around 10th position (I still think 10th is better than 4th to 9th though so I'm happy with that).

The only thing we tried to do (or could do under the circumstances) was keep as much of the visible text the same as possible.

[pmkpmk]

Been through this recently. In this thread, you will find some help too: [webmasterworld.com ]