Relaunching Your Website Without Affecting SEO

Avoid Losing Your Ranking

Relaunching Your Website

Is it time to have a website makeover? Relaunching your website is an exciting experience. You’ll get a new look and design that best portrays your brand. Changing your website from time to time may be necessary because Google algorithms change and you always need to keep up with the changes. The key to website relaunching is to always ensure you maintain a professional, user friendly and simple design.

You need to be very cautious when re-launching your website to avoid losing your ranking. Remember that search engines have already crawled and indexed your web pages so make sure you don’t lose the authority and rankings you’ve built overtime. Here’s how to ensure a smooth transition when re-launching your website.

Redirect All Pages To New Corresponding URL

Make sure you check all the URLs on your website that drove organic traffic and ensure that they are redirected to the new URLs. This will make sure you do not lose any link equity and traffic. In some cases, you will have to redirect each page manually. It may be a lot of work if you have thousands of pages. You can have a spreadsheet to keep track of all your new and old URLs and make sure they are all correctly moved. The idea is to ensure that you don’t lose link authority by ensuring all old URLs are properly redirected.

“Nonindex” The Web Pages

To ensure that you don’t face any duplicate content issues, make sure you use the meta robots tag. This simply tells search engines to skip certain pages when crawling the new website. Doing this is very simple if you are using a CMS like WordPress. Meta robots tag instructs search engines to skip those pages in their results database.

Move The Website In Phases

Doing this is more likely to help you avoid the possibility of failure when relaunching your website. Consider moving the site in phases. Start with one subdomain then a subcategory and then the subdirectory. As you move each section, give it time for Google to crawl it and see how well that has worked out before you go ahead with the next section.

Have An Updated Sitemap

Most people forget that a new website will need a new sitemap too. You must make sure the new URLs are added to the sitemap. If you have different types of content, consider separate sitemaps for each. This is especially important if the URL of your sitemaps will be changing when you launch the new version of your website.

Connect Your Social Accounts

The relaunched site also needs to get referrals from your social account. Start by visiting all your social media pages and adding links to the relaunched website. This includes links of posts that you have shared on social media in the past. Ensure that your SEO doesn’t get affected when you relaunch the website. Aim to deliver better user experience and maintain your site relevance even as you take steps to improve your branding online.

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