By Courtney Mills
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-04-05
I recently wrote an article which outlined how to create a first-class home page and this got me thinking, does your Google ranking drop when you re-design your website?
Well, I did some research and came across some great advice from the team at the Flyte marketing blog. In short, it is possible to keep your ranking in the search engines whilst re-designing your site; you just need to get your 301 redirects sorted.One of the biggest factors the search engines use when determining your ranking is trust. Google is more inclined to trust a site that has been in existence for a while and that has many incoming links to it. Often, when rebuilding a site, you end up changing the URLs of your web pages. The problem is though that these new URLs don't have the trust that the old URLs do, even if a lot of the content is the same.
When you take your established content and place it somewhere else, you are effectively resetting the clock on when that content was created and breaking all of the inbound links that pointed to it.
How can you re-establish this trust with the search engines?
The most effective way to tell the search engines that you've moved your content is through the 301 redirect. By setting up 301 redirects for your content, you show search engines where your content has moved from, and your inbound links will now direct to your new pages.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, then I suggest leaving the work to your web developer.
If you think you're capable of implementing 301 redirects for your site, the Flyte blog has shared the following resources to get you started:
Even with a 301 redirect in place, you should expect a dip in ranking during a major overhaul of your website, but it won't be permanent. Our SEO team says that you should be back to normal in about a month or.
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