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The Art of SEO
book

The Art of SEO

by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, Jessie Stricchiola
October 2009
Beginner content levelBeginner
602 pages
19h 50m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from The Art of SEO

Maintaining Search Engine Visibility During and After a Site Redesign

Companies may decide to launch a site redesign as part of a rebranding of their business, a shift in their product lines, a marketing makeover, or for any number of reasons. During a site redesign, any number of things may change on the site. For example:

  • Content may move to new URLs.

  • Content might be eliminated.

  • Content could be moved behind a login.

  • New sections may be added.

  • New functionality may be added.

  • Navigation/internal linking structure may be changed significantly.

Of course, this may involve moving everything to a new domain as well, but we will cover that in Maintaining Search Engine Visibility During and After Domain Name Changes. Here are some best practices for handling a site redesign:

  • Create 301 redirects for all URLs from the original version of the site pointing to the proper URLs on the site. This should cover scenarios such as any remapping of locations of content and any content that has been eliminated. Use a spreadsheet similar to the one we outlined at the beginning of this chapter to map out the moves to make sure you get them all.

  • Review your analytics for the top 100 or so domains sending traffic to the moved and/or eliminated pages, and contact as many of these webmasters as possible about changing their links. This can help the search engines understand the new layout of your site more rapidly and also provides a better branding and user experience.

  • Review a backlink report (using your favorite ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596809133Errata Page