Ways to limit loss of rankings when re-launching a website

The New Year is often a time when businesses think of re-vamping their existing website. This could be anything from simply updating the content or re-arranging the layout of the pages to a full site re-design. Keeping your website fresh and up to date is important for your website visitors and for your rankings in the search engines. However, before you start, you need to ensure you don’t fall into the common traps that companies can encounter when updating a site, particularly if it involves launching a brand new website.

1. 404 ‘error’ page
It is essential you have a 404 ‘error’ page on your website. We’ve covered this in a previous issue of MK (which you can read here), but basically it’s a dynamically generated page that loads when someone comes to your site from a broken link (perhaps an old page that is still in the search engines’ database) or if someone clicks on a broken link within your website. Some good examples of these ‘error’ pages are:
Delia Online - complete navigation is offered to the lost visitor
Country Life offer a very comprehensive 404 page to ensure you find what you are looking for
If you don’t have one of these pages, a visitor will end up on a browser error page if they click on a broken link instead, which doesn’t look good. Here's an example:
Marks & Spencer error page
The only way to navigate out of it is to hit the ‘back’ button in your browser. When launching a new website, make sure you have a working 404 error page so that if visitors arrive on your website from an old web page that’s still in the search results, you’ll retain the visitor on your website and not send them away to your competitors!

2. Redirects
If the content on your new website is fairly similar to the content that was on your old site, but you’re changing the actual page urls (or page names), .e.g from aboutus.htm to about.asp, then you can redirect the old page to the new page with a ‘301’ redirect. This is done by your webmaster on the website’s server. This is a technical job, but it ensures that the search engines will follow the redirect from your old web page to your new web page and know they need to index the new page instead. This will also help with any links you have gained from other websites – the links will follow through to the new page with the redirect.

3. Content
If your website has a lot of content, particularly content that ranked well in the search results, make sure it is added in when the new site is launched. Search engines are very quick to remove ‘dead’ pages from their search results (can be within a couple of weeks on Google and Yahoo!), so if your content isn’t on the new site when it’s launched, you could find it gets removed very quickly from the search engines database. The best option is to re-direct the old content page to the new content page (as explained above), and put all the content from your old site that you want to add into your new website as soon as possible. Make sure all the content pages are included in your website’s sitemap.

4. Website Optimisation
When launching your new website, make sure you optimise it as soon as possible, particularly if the old website was fully optimised. The last thing you want is for your website to lose its rankings that you worked hard for when promoting your old website. You will find rankings will fluctuate for a few months anyway when launching a new site, but optimising the new website early on may lessen the impact.

5. Link Building & PR
Whether you’ve been promoting your website prior to re-build or about to start promoting it, you must make sure you find the resources to do some link building. This is particularly important for high rankings in Google, and it isn’t the quantity of links, but the quality of those links. Gain links from relevant industry or regional directories, industry websites that can drive targeted traffic and any articles or press releases you may have. If your new website is to be a major re-launch, why not send out a press release to online as well as offline publications that would also get you links to your new site to boot!

6. Google Sitemaps
Finally, set up a Google Account and use the Google Sitemaps tool that will tell you of any problems Google has indexing your website and when it last indexed the site, which pages it has indexed and even stats on traffic to the site. This is a very useful free tool that gives all sorts of information, so well worth setting up – just ask your webmaster or designer to do this for you as you will need to add some verification code to the site.

Following these tips won't stop your website's rankings from fluctuating for a few months when the new site is launched, but should see results eventually bounce back. Just re-launching a website without taking the above precautions will involve a lot more work in regaining any rankings that your website previously had.