A question we get asked a lot is, “if we're updating our site will this affect our SEO?” the answer is generally no but there are some pit falls you must avoid.
1. Make sure the URLs stay the same. Sometimes it's tempting to change the URL structure of your site in order to make things more organised. For example maybe you have a URL like www.yourdomain.com/product -101 which has a high ranking on the search term “product 101”. If you change the URL to www.yourdomain.com/product-1 then that page would almost immediately drop off Google, your traffic will decrease and you’ll be wondering what’s happened. Sometimes people think a way around this is to 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. This can work but Google can sometimes ignore 301 redirects. Another thing to watch out for are site builders that automatically alter your URLs when you change the page title of a page.
2. Make sure your Meta Data stays the same. Sometimes when you update a site the Meta Data, and in particular your pages titles can change. An example that we've seen many times is where someone's updated their website and after the new site goes live the home page title is simply set to “Home”( See our previous “home is not where your site lives” article). This generally comes about where web design companies are so design led that they ignore critical SEO based continuity when updating a sites design.
3. Pain text content. Make sure that the plain text based content that’s on your existing site is replicated on the new site. So often we’ve see people update their site for a more image heavily “less is more” approach. From a humans perspective these sites can look great, however the search engines are not human. It’s therefore important to make sure that the great looking design sits alongside relevant text based content that the search engines can see and appreciate.
4. The forth rule is easy. Don’t use flash!
We hope you found this article useful and if you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
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