Redesign: How 301 Redirects Preserve Traffic

Redesign: How 301 Redirects Preserve Traffic

You work night and day to get a new redesign complete. You contract the best creative talent you can find to create a top-notch site. The day of the launch arrives and you flip the switch!

Then something unexpected happens -- in the next 3 weeks you watch the number of visitors to your site drop by 20%. What's going on here?!?

If your revenue is tied to your website, this is a scary picture! What has just occured is that you've lost all your traffic from search engines and other incoming links. Here are 3 simple redesign rules to help you avoid this picture:

1. Avoid Flash for your site navigation.
   Anytime I see an entire website created in Flash, I cringe. This is like nailing up a sign on your site that says, "We don't want any visitors from outside our universe." The problem? Flash sites are difficult for search engine spiders like Google to crawl. While Google can read the text within Flash documents, it is far from ideal. It's very difficult to optimize a site for good organic rankings if your entire site is built using Flash. Don't get me wrong, Flash has it's place (we love Flash for audio/video, ads and special effects) just not for site navigation.
2. Keep the file and directory names the same.
   If possible, keep the file and directory names the same as on the old site. In this way, the listings that you have in Google and other search engines will only see a change in the content. However, this is often impossible if the redesign is of any size at all. If so, rule 3 is for you:
3. If file or directory names are different, use a 301 Redirect.
   You want to use a 301 ("Moved Permanently") Redirect to automatically and properly point traffic from your old pages to the new locations. A 301 Redirect is the most search engine-friendly method to accomplish this. If you are technically inclinded, you can find a fairly comprehensive explanation here. Or ask your host provider or web developer if they have an easy way to implement 301 Redirects.
   
   We have done this for our redesign clients with a simple system that lets them enter the old URL and the new URL in our Content Management Tool. They can enter an unlimited number of entries, and it automatically sends site visitors to the correct page based on the client criteria. Now, 301 redirects are not ironclad assurance that your rankings won't suffer - at least temporarily. But more often then not, any lost rankings will return within a few weeks or months at most. Oftentimes there are no ill effects whatsoever. Google is getting better at indexing the new URL's quickly and applying link popularity to the new pages so as to maintain that page's rankings.

It's easy for details like this to get lost in the shuffle when completing a redesign. But when you pay attention to these details, you take the dividends it pays to the bank.

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