Doing a complete site overhaul - all at once or gradually?

[James2]

Our site is due a complete overhaul and we are just waiting for a new webmaster to make the changes. I work in the marketing dept so have rewritten most of the text already and studied up on SEO and have asked questions here and had a few very usefull pm's on here so I have a check list of things to do. The webmaster I think we are bringing in to do the work is greener than me about SEO, he is more design focused.

The thing is, there's so much that has to change: the structure, meta data, pictures, text, external links, new pages etc. The site is about ten years old by the way. We have already bought similar domain names aswell but not yet linked/ redirected them.

These changes have to happen and we don't have the money to spend on an expert pure and simple. We are a small business.

So my question is, how is the best way to go about these changes? All at once or over time? If over time, how and when for what?

[goodroi]

i prefer to make slow changes gradually over time.

this minimizes accidentally triggering certain google filters. it also allows you to see how each change impacts the site. i would guess not ever change is going to have the impact that you are expecting. it also helps with usability since you will give your users a chance to acclimate to each small change as opposed to being shocked with a dramatic change.

besides you mention you are a small business so do you even have the time & money to redo everything overnight?

good luck

[CenSin]

The site is about ten years old by the way.

If you are doing complete overhaul, ever thought of the possibility of loosing traffics, link juices, pagerank, etc.

[FranticFish]

I'd say it depends on the size of the site. I don't work with large sites so I prefer to get everything done at once. If it's a db driven site and you have proper server access then you can develop the new version on a sub-domain or in a folder, get it all tested and working then just change the file/server paths in your 'global constants' file and move some folders on the server to roll the site out. As long as changes are carefully considered and you have appropriate redirects in place in the event of url changes, then it should all go smoothly.

[HuskyPup]

the structure, meta data, pictures, text, external links, new pages etc.

Do you mean all/most of the existing urls will change/disappear or will you be reconstructing most of the current pages from top to bottom?

The webmaster I think we are bringing in to do the work is greener than me about SEO, he is more design focused.

Why are you using a designer and not a site constructor?

All at once or over time? If over time, how and when for what?

I assume with it being 10 years old that it's a flat html site. Are you keeping it this way or do you intend adding new elements including flash etc?

I completely hand rebuilt a 10 year old site, several thousand pages, this last summer working on a few pages or site section every few days or even every day when possible, checking absolutely everything from header to footer however no urls changed whatsoever.

All were steadily updated by each engine with no problem.

[aakk9999]

It really depends on what kind of changes to the site you are doing. Some changes are just not possible to do "little by little". If you are changing IA or main navigation structure, then it is less likely you can do it gradually on "page by page" basis. Also, if you try, you could have quite a bit of mess for a while having old & new structure co-exist on the same site and you could keep Google confused long time.

We recently did it twice, with two different sites and we went for a big-bang approach as there was no other way really. The first site tanked for about two weeks until it got recrawled and then recovered and improved as new IA and site structure fixed many problems the old site had.

The second site which we did just last month did not tank at all - and there apart from IA/navigation changes we also changed default language of the home page. It now shows steady improvement in ranking. But it is worth noting that both sites were 8-9 years established sites and we presume they both had a degree of trust. Both sites had also site-wide URL changes from dynamic to friendly URLs.

We did make sure the site is properly tested before going live, that all page-to-page redirects were in place, that there are no canonical issues (there were with old versions), de-duped where required etc. Only when we were completely happy we put site live to replace the old one(s).

It could however be that fixing canonical and de-duping has cushioned/offset the "fall" that would happen in such cases.