What Google Says About Website Revamp to Avoid SEO Problems
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Revamping a website, whether it's yours or for someone else, is super important for modern marketing. But when you're making big changes, there's a risk for SEO problems. Issues during the update might make search engines doubt how trustworthy your site is on certain topics.?
John Mueller from Google advises thinking ahead before changing how the website looks and works. Fixing SEO problems caused by these changes can take a long time, so it's best to plan things out carefully.
During Site Revamps, Several Common SEO Challenges Can Arise:
A. Loss of rankings and organic traffic: Alterations in content, design, or technical structure can affect ranking, as if search engines perceive the updated site as less relevant or authoritative, rankings may drop, leading to a decrease in organic traffic.
B. URL structure changes: Altering URL structures during a site revamp can disrupt existing SEO efforts. Search engines might have indexed the old URLs, and changing them without proper redirection can result in broken links, leading to 404 errors and loss of valuable SEO authority and understanding the page relationships.
C. Content migration issues: During site revamps, moving or updating content can lead to issues such as missing or duplicated content, broken internal links, or changes in keyword density. These issues can confuse search engine crawlers and impact the site's visibility and ranking.
D. Technical glitches and their effect on SEO performance: Technical problems, such as slow page speed, improper implementation of structured data, or server errors. Search engines prioritize user experience, and technical glitches can lead to poor user engagement, negatively affecting search rankings.
Addressing these challenges requires meticulous planning, including conducting SEO audits, mapping out redirects, ensuring proper content migration, and thorough testing to minimize the negative impact on SEO during site revamps.
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Prepare First, Then Implement Changes:
As Mueller advises, it's smart to plan out how changes will be introduced. Documenting the initial website state, creating backups, and using a staging environment are particularly crucial steps.
1 - Crawl The Website
Before making significant alterations, it's essential to thoroughly examine the site using tools like Screaming Frog. Start by crawling the original version and then the updated version (preferably before it's live).
The data from this crawl can help spot various issues that can be resolved before the site goes live. Check for:
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2 - Back Up the Website
Always maintain multiple backups of your website. Numerous things could potentially go awry with a website backup. Learning from experience, it's crucial to have redundant backups.
For instance, a consultant mistakenly corrupted hundreds of thousands of images by using the wrong transfer type while working on my server. Thankfully, I had backups both on my desktop and duplicate backups on the server itself, enabling the recovery of the images.
3 - Stage the Website
Creating a staging environment is a best practice to review any changes before they're applied to the live server.
The live site is referred to as the production environment, while the non-live duplicate is the staging environment.
Staging involves creating a duplicate version of the site, ideally on a separate server or at least in a distinct location on the server to prevent accidental changes from the staging environment reaching the live one.
This staging area is used for development and quality assurance testing before implementing changes on the live website. Its primary aim is to identify and rectify issues, bugs, or errors before they impact the live site (production environment).
In summary, Revamping a website is integral to modern marketing, given the ever-changing tech landscape and user expectations. Yet, it bears SEO risks that could impact a site's authority and visibility.?
The advice to document, backup, and stage changes stands crucial to avoid costly missteps. It underscores the significance of thorough preparation before implementing alterations, safeguarding the website's performance and visibility.