Search Engine Marketing, Social Media, Marketing Strategy | Cyclickal.com

At some point in the evolution of your company, you may find that you have outgrown your website. Perhaps your company gets bought out or the old website becomes so convoluted that a fresh start and/or a fresh brand becomes necessary. The marketing team is excited about the prospect of developing new messaging, creating new creative and graphics, and promoting the new platform, and the IT team is excited about new, updated web capabilities and the challenge of designing new pages! The only grump happens to be a hybrid of these two groups – the SEO Specialist. The SEO guru approaches this situation with caution: they don’t want to ditch the hard earned rankings and link juice they’ve spent so long earning over the years. Understandable. The following will lay out how to save your SEO ranking when launching the new site!

The project will be broken into 5 steps:

1. Project Management/Planning

This blog serves to make this step as easy as possible. You will need to lay out the execution of the project and determine the resources needed to accomplish it within your time frame. In order to get an initial idea of how many sites you will be redirecting, you must determine how many sites are in the search engine indices. A quick “site:” search on Google and Yahoo should help you determine this. Yahoo! will likely return more results. Your resources and time constraints may limit how many sites you will be able to redirect, but the goal should be to 301 redirect as many ranking sites as possible so that you lose as little traffic as possible.

2. Analysis

First and foremost, gather benchmarking data from the original site. You will use this later to determine the success of this project! Review your data to determine the amount of traffic all of your ranked pages bring in using your weblogs, google analytics, omniture, or whatever data sources you have available. Using this in conjunction with your constraints will allow you to determine which sites you should focus on. If you have a seasonal business, you might need to go back one year to see your top sites – otherwise, a few months will do. I would recommend compiling a list as comprehensive as possible, however, the size and scope of your project will be dependent on the size of your site as well as your resource constraints.

3. Execution

Each site will have to be 301 redirected to a site most like it on the new site. A 301 redirect represents a permanent change in the eyes of the search engines and is the only redirect that can be used if you want to maintain your rank. The execution phase will likely be the bulk of the project, because each web page must be redirected to its’ equivalent web page on the new site. For time estimation purposes, expect to complete 2000 web pages a day unless you are able to find shortcuts like those I mention below. The search engines will penalize mass redirects to one site or redirects to a site that is unlike the original. This technique is often used by spammers, and therefore, must be handled with care by those using the 301 redirect honestly! This phase can be shortened by creating a script that pull out information on the web pages that give clues as to what the web page is about, such as the header or h1 tag. This is where a habit clear coding comes in handy! Certain sections might also go quickly, such as directories, if you can find patterns in the URL structures on either site!

4. Quality Assurance

I would execute sites in sections starting with less important web pages for damage control. Spot check each section before execution to make sure redirects are working and going to the ideal location. Monitor the re-rankings of these sites to make sure search engines accept your 301 redirect methodology!

5. Assessment and Resolving Issues

Once the project is complete, it will take a bit of time for the redirects to rank the pages in your new website. Monitor traffic closely to make sure there are little to no drops in traffic. Research any behavior that may indicate a problem with your 301 redirects and address if possible.

Good luck!