How do I Retain SE Rank While Completely Redesigning my Site?

Redesigning SE Concerns

[swangin305]

Thanks in advance for taking the time to help me out on this. I am new to SEO but am quickly coming along. The company I work for has an all ready successful E-commerce site. It has not been optimized properly yet it ranks high in google for almost every keyword, mainly due to the amount of content I've noticed. Our entire company relies on these sales to survive. For the last 6 months, they have been creating an entirely new website to replace our existing one. My concern is that we will loose our rank for all these keywords followed by our jobs as well. Can anyone tell me what precautions to take. The new site is entirely different from the old one. The only thing that will remain is our domain name. My main concern really is 1) Will google recognize this as a new site and possibly take some time to index the new pages. I mean is this basically like starting over? 2)From what I've learned, a 301 redirect will ensure our links don't end up dead and quite possibly retain our link popularity and page rank. Is this all it will do or will it help retain some of this keyword relevance? 3) What should we do to ensure this does not kill all of our traffic?

[buckworks]

Take heart ... I've been through this and survived!

The single most important thing you can do to retain your rankings is to make individual 301 redirects from as many old old pages as you can to the equivalent new pages.

Make sure that Old Page will redirect to Equivalent New Page with a single step ... no chains of redirects.

They MUST be 301 redirects, so keep an eye on what the techies are doing. Sometimes they think any old redirect will do the job.

It's a lot of work to set up individual redirects, so focus first on pages that have inbound links from external sources, then do as many of the rest as you can.

Once the new site is launched, invest some time to get external links updated wherever possible.

I was involved in a massive site makeover late last year, where only a handful of pages kept the same URLs. The techies lost count of how many individual redirects they made (hundreds!) but the site got through the update with its rankings intact. Within a week after launch, new URLs were starting to replace old URLs in Google SERPs; it took about a month for all three search engines to fully switch to the new URLs. Traffic is better now than last year because the site is better optimized all around, and internal pages are getting a lot more long tail traffic than the old version ever got.

[swangin305]

Thanks for the quick response. I appreciate every bit of help I can get. So 301 everything and hope for the best? Now obviously we have to make sure these new pages are optimized for the keywords we're redirecting from right? That's my main concern now, only because I don't think anyone thought of that. If anyone else has any other suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks Again

[MadeWillis]

I would also prepare a list of pitfalls and provide this to your higher-ups. Make them aware of what could go wrong and how you plan to counteract. The last thing you want is for the site owner to be surprised if some rankings are lost!

I've just been through your situation with a smaller ecommerce site. Everything went well, so just take your time and make sure you have things setup right before you implement this change.

[swangin305]

OK thats great. I feel a lot better about this transition now. I'm definitely making my superiors aware of the pitfalls in doing this. First, we're going to make sure each new page is correctly optimized for the equivalent old page. I want to make sure these new pages will maintain their position in the SERPs for the targeted keywords. No one specifically told me to do this, but it seems like the logical thing to do. At the same time, I am taking every precaution to make sure we redirect every page starting with the top entrance pages first and working our way down. Then I am going to make sure we update our google site map to ensure our newer pages that have no old pages redirecting to them get crawled and indexed. Finally, we're going to contact all of our inward link providers and make sure they update the URLs. I think I've got it all covered, but I don't want to miss anything, so if anyone has anything additional to add, please do. Thanks again for all of your vital input.

[alloyweb]

Hey,
how did your redesign go? Did you retain all your traffic? Did you learn anything new?

And when you said.... "First, we're going to make sure each new page is correctly optimized for the equivalent old page. I want to make sure these new pages will maintain their position in the SERPs for the targeted keywords. No one specifically told me to do this, but it seems like the logical thing to do."

I was wondering specifically how you "optimized" each new page to be the same as the old pages? If each page has the same text/body content, what else can be done do 'optimize' the new ones?

For exmaple, should I make sure that the <title> tags are exactly the same, or does that not matter?

Thanks!

[undercoverseo]

I had a similar situation as the original poster. In addition to 301s, I'd also recommend reviewing the on-page aspect of your original site compared to your new site. Make sure your new pages are targeting the same keywords in the same manner as they were on the old site. I'd hate to use the term keyword density, but basically make sure the new site doesn't have less targeted text.

It would really be bad to see your rankings dip b/c the new site wasn't optimized the same way as the original pages.