Website Redesign? – Don’t Forget to Redirect
Website Redesign projects can be large, time-consuming, and expensive. From the beginning phases of selecting the right agency to partner with, to creating compelling user-interface designs, to the implementation of Content Management Systems and other back-end functionality – a complete and professionally built web site will be a time consuming endeavor. Applying the old adage that “you get what you pay for,” your investment in time, money, and resources should pay off in a strong online brand that generates inbound traffic and leads, accomplishes your defined set of activity objectives and provides measure ROI.
When working on a redesign of an existing website, don’t fall into the trap of “throwing the baby out with the bath water.” Your old website has some value – especially if it has been in existence for some time. The major search engines have indexed your site and assigned specific page rank to each of them. When companies completely overhaul their websites as part of a redesign, this typically entails reordering pages and otherwise changing the web address of pages. When Google revisits your site after the launch of your redesigned pages, it won’t find the pages it had previously ranked. If you don’t leave explicit instructions to the Google on where that page has been moved to, Google will simply delete that page out of its index.
You don’t want to lose your old page ranks when your new site launches. To prevent this from happening, create an address list of all old pages and their new page addresses. Implement this list into your web server as a 301 Redirect list. A 301 Redirect is an instruction given to the search engine indicating that the web page address it has in its index has been permanently moved to a new address. A 301 Redirect will cause the Search Engine to update its index to the new location, and will help ensure that all the effort spent on Search Engine Optimization, link building, and content creation from your old site, is transferred to your new site.
: ... 07/14/09 07:46pm
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