Don’t loose your rankings in Search for the sake of Revamping:
September 12, 2008
Web Portal Redesigning and Revamping is something you cant avoid as the user need and the meaning for the portal to the targeted audience keeps on changing its mandatory to revamp the portal. But we often loose out in Search Engine rankings while we revamp our site. Let me list some of the essential things to be considered before revamp so that we don’t loose much:
- Check the Sections / Categories that are removed from the Portal – List down the pages that are waiting to be deleted.
- Check the Keywords affixed to the particular pages that are in plan for deletion –Check the ranking for the particular keywords in major search engines.
- Check out the Internal Links that we are going to loose because of the page deletion
- Check the alternative URLs that are assigned to be redirected to the deleted pages. Use 301 Permanent Re-direction.
- Check if the Site Architecture is changing. Plan based on the new Site Architecture
- Check out the pages that have prominence in the new Site Architecture. You’re your URL Structuring based on that.
- Check the loss in Internal Links to each page and make a plan for the compensation so that we don’t loose a lot due to revamp.
- Check the Title tags and Meta tags for the pages that are changing. Ensure that the pages are tagged properly based on the Keyword Architecture after the revamp.
- Check the Images/ Graphics and their corresponding tags, so that we don’t loose the traffic from them after revamp.
- Ensure that none of the page hits 404 Error after revamp. Ensure that the URLs which are deleted are redirected to the corresponding pages in the new structure
These are some of the factors that are to be considered before revamping any portal. Inspite of considering all these factors there will be a drop in Search in traffic when ever the Site Architecture changes radically. But if we consider these factors and manage them effectively Search Engine crawlers will locate the new pages and get our rankings back immediately.
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Entry Filed under: SEO. Tags: Portal Redesigning, Tips for Portal Revamping, Website Restructuring.
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