Relaunching Website

Advice and views on what to do and how to do it

[Tarquin]

Hello - I am about to relaunch my site with a totally fresh look and feel. Where I have good search engine rankings I have kept the folder names the same and tried to keep much of the content the same. But for much of the site its all new and greatly expanded.

When I flick the switch later this week - I want to be able to minimize any drop in rankings as much as possible. I will create a sitemap and submit that, plus put redirects in place but I would like to hear from people that have done this in the past and any advice/ guidance you can provide on how best to launch the new and anything I should be doing!

Many thanks

[tedster]

If you can keep the same urls for key pages - or use a 301 redirect when keeping the same url isn't practical, then you're a good part of the way there. For bigger sites, I would let the lower level discontinued urls just go 404. Your results may differ, but I've now used that approach twice and Google seems to be able to get the new site "understood" much faster without thousands of 301's to analyze.

You didn't mention how many new urls are being added. If it's in the 5-6 figure area, some people find that a stepwise launch works better than all at once, which can sometimes raise some flags.

[Tarquin]

Tedster - thank you very much for your feedback.

For all main rankings and main traffic pages we are keeping them the same. However as the site was last updated in 2001, many folder names/ file names are not great SEO wise so they are being changed in hope to improve rankings and the site structure. The site is about 200 pages in total with 50 staying the same and the rest being changed - plus about 50 new pages.

Thanks

[dibbern2]

I always use the 'remove page' tool at G-webmasters to officially get rid of obsolete pages.

Can't guarantee that its necessary, but it seems to work well for me -with a G-sitemap- in achieving quick reindexing of all my new work.

Couldn't hurt...