Site Redesign = Lost Rankings?

Is it possible to launch a new website w/o losing our Google rankings?

Help please? I've been tasked with replacing an old, out-of-date, poorly designed site for our business, an orthopaedic care clinic.

After many hours of work, our SEO consultant belatedly tells the surgeon in charge (who's even less technically oriented than I am) that he cannot guarantee that we'll keep our Google rankings if we replace the old site. We've got a couple of #1s and a #2 for search terms vital to our patient load. Our potential programmer is happy to preserve all of the elements our SEO consultant has created on the old site. The consultant, however, tells us that if we replace the old site, we "break" the ranking and may never get it back. The surgeon is quite reasonably reluctant to take this risk.

Common sense suggests that something is wrong here. Companies update and replace old sites regularly. Can it be done without risking our ranking? We have to move on from this old, hard-to-navigate site...

Many thanks.

I am relatively new to SEO, but (correct me if I'm wrong) I am pretty sure if you keep the same content you have right now with all your keywords in tact, it shouldn't affect it. Spiders don't recognize the design part of websites, so keeping your content would keep it stable, to my knowledge anyways. Oh and look it's my first post

If you don't trust your SEO consultant, then either hire new consultant or do it yourself.

BTW, I agree with your SEO consultant. You * may * lose your SE ranking, if you re-design your website.

Thanks, phrail and Dinkar.

This seems to be where we are: somewhere between "probably not" and "maybe."

I still don't understand how anyone with good SEO rankings ever manages to launch a new site, if it puts those rankings at risk---and yet risk-averse companies do just that all the time.

Can anyone, anywhere, tell me what I'm missing? How do the big fellas do it?

Dinkar, if you lose that SEO ranking, are you starting over, or will a site claw its way back based previous efforts?

Thanks again for the above posts,
agco

It may claw its way back - but not due to the previous site/content.

If it is a new domain then the SE will view it as brand new and you start from scratch.

Be sure to take down ALL content and close your old domain other wise you can suffer penalties from duplicate content as well.

My question to you is - why are you not just redesigning and adding new content to the 1st domain instead of making a whole new domain? It may lose some ranking ( may! ) but you would not be starting all over again....

I don't think agco is getting a new domain, I think he was asking for the same domain, if I'm not mistaken.

There's plenty of measures you can take to reduce the risk - but first you need to be clear about the process that creates the risk.

Obviously, if you change the content on a page, then Google (and the others) will re-evaluate it's relevance compared to other sites.

If the core of the site is the same - in this case, orthopedic care - then, over time, on balance, things will be much the same. But in the short term, there could be major damage, and some individual pages will, of course, be damaged forever (while new stars may appear!).

Which brings up the next point. Provided both old and new sites use domain.com, then few of your links will be damaged. Changing the home page's URL is a pretty good guarantee of losing SEO value. But even being commonsensical with domain.com doesn't protect everything; you are guaranteed to lose some deeplinks if page names are changed, but that may not matter much.

All in all, a major change is sure to cause some short term damage, and no amount of 301s will avoid that completely.

And any SEO who says different is probably just after your money.

All the above can be minimised, and that's what you need to review before a decision is made.

Be thinking about:

1. Careful planning
2. 301s
3. Incremental change.
4. Updating links
5. Compensatory SEO
6. Finding the UP Side - fixing old errors, etc.

The biggest damage is done by new file names; Cool URIs Don't Change

[ Message was edited by: Quadrille 01/10/2008 03:07 pm ]

A careful SEO with a very good plan should be able to preserve most of your rankings, but there will be some that drop and others that rise.

It isn't possible, in advance, to tell "which ones" or "by how much". Their experience will come into play as to what techniques to avoid.

Dinkar, if you lose that SEO ranking, are you starting over, or will a site claw its way back based previous efforts?

I didn't lose any SE ranking. Did I said so? Nope. And I didn't said that you * WILL * lose your ranking. I said you * MAY * lose the ranking. It also means - your site * may * gain the ranking. Your new design may help your site to rank better and convert more.

Here are few things you may like to tell your designer:

1. DO NOT change the URLs. If you have a page about Item_A and it's URL is yoursite.com/cool-item-A.html then keep the same URL for new design. Most of the time the designers/ programmers create new URLs and set 301 redirect from old to new URL. Tell them to keep the same old URL.

2. Use CSS to cut as much html code as you can.

3. Use external CSS and JavaScript files.

4. Talk with your SEO consultant. He may know much more about your project that we may not know.

see now these guys are MUCH better are explaining this - I knew what I meant but could not explain it as well - sorry for any confusion + I thought you were getting a new domain but same content - again sorry.

I have come to expect that the term "new site" could mean almost anything, and that only the OP probably actually knows what they mean by that. I often answer a question by guessing what the question was.

That is, there are often no or very few clues as to what was actually meant, and you can often read the question any way you like. It's always down to the poster to be clear as to exactly what they are asking.

Does name changing also apply with the paths? I mean if I were to place a file into a directory so that I can sort out the different files.

I.E.
if: www.mydomain.com/toys.htm

were to become: www.mydomain.com/coolthings/toys.htm

would that affect it as well?

Yes.

So far as Google (and all the SEs) are concerned, coolthings/toys.htm is a new file.

You might consider a 301 from www.mydomain.com/toys.htm to www.mydomain.com/coolthings/toys.htm

If it's just the occasional file, I'd not worry, it'll be rapidly assimilated after a couple of spider visits.

But if it's a major shake up, 301s are vital.

If the URL changes by even one character, longer, shorter, or just replacing one character with another, then it is a different URL.