Most of the time, carrying out a website redesign comes with the challenge of the site losing its mileage in terms of the SEO efforts inputted. This is also a challenge for the SEO companies and web design experts because they stand to lose their job if this happens.
Unfortunately, the fear of SEO penalties from the search engines drives a majority of business owners to dump the existing site and start all over again in the website redesigning process. This move may work to speed up your drop to the bottom of the search engine rankings. All you need to do is take a careful analytical look at your SEO issues so that you can avoid any punitive actions after the redesign instead of tossing off the entire old site away.
What happens during and after site redesign?
The process of SEO is greatly affected when a site is redesigned. This is why after such a redesign; the company may end up losing its remaining organic traffic.
Here are the main SEO aspects that get affected:
1. Internal Links
During the SEO process, a lot of emphasis is laid on site navigation and site pages interlinking. The more links a page has, all other things remaining equal, the higher the ranking spot it acquires. It simply means that the page is quite important. When the site is redesigned, the resulting page equivalent may have lesser links, meaning that it will lose its authority as being very important. This means lower ranking for the new page.
2. Page Content
Normally, when a site gets redesigned, the content is also rewritten. This means that if a page was ranking well for a certain term that was on that page, there is a huge possibility of it loosing that ranking if the term is changed during the rewrite process.
3. The SEO Structure
What happens to the redesigned site if you delete an entire page? You change the internal link structure, remove the back links to the page from other sites and even delete the entire content that was on that page which was indexed on the search engines. This completely alters your “SEO DNA” leaving you with a lot of 404 errors on your website for your visitors. That can lead to serious penalties by the search engines.
The Solution
Should you experience the outlined results and challenges with your site redesign, there are only two ways to try and resolve the problem; one, try to work with your new site to see how you can recover your lost rankings and two, restore the old site.
Most of the time, you never realize what you have until you lose it. It would be wise to restore your old site and try to improve it than come up with an entirely new site that brings you no business at all. However, if the punitive actions do not cost you so much loss, or if the new site brings in new and warm leads, then you may want to work with it to drive more business.