It is very common to come across situations where a website redesign is being implemented and mistakes occur during this phase \u2013 mistakes which are very common and can occur very easily. While the redesign might improve some aspects of the website such as an improved UI, higher conversions, improved messaging and branding, other aspects might deteriorate such as a drop in SEO or website traffic. Although there are numerous resources available on the internet, that have previously spelt out these errors and how to avoid them, the mistakes do occur from time to time. This post brings about information on how to identify these mistakes and prevent their recurrence in future:<\/p>\n
1. The Dev Site gets indexed or your main site does not get indexed<\/strong> – This happens because in the course of the development webmasters do not want the Dev Site to be indexed by Google, but sometimes despite their best efforts there are a few portions of their main site that do point to the Dev Site or some specific pages of the Dev Site. Two methods to prevent a website being crawled by search engines are as follows:<\/p>\n \u2022 A robots directive can be put to block all of the dev\/ staging content<\/p>\n \u2022 A Meta noindex tag can be put on each page<\/p>\n Webmasters need to ensure that they only block the Dev Site from being indexed and not the main site. For this they need to make sure that they remove the nofollow meta tag from the code that they are transferring for the main website if they had previously used the noindex way of stopping the indexing.<\/p>\n 2. The Analytics in the website is not properly installed<\/strong> – This is a marketing and sales issue and some common mistakes are as follows:<\/p>\n \u2022 Creating a new profile – A new profile is created and this erases historical data of the old profile and leads to significant issues in historical tracking. \u2022 Checking for the code \u2013 Sometimes the code does not get carried over to the new site and it is important not only to check that Google Analytics is properly installed, but also to ensure that all source code also gets properly installed. Tools like Screaming Frog and GA Checker can help in this regard. It is important to do these checks because if a webmaster is unable to accurately track SEO traffic, then the efforts involved in organic SEO search activities will be hampered.<\/p>\n 3. Inadvertently changing link structures and URLs <\/strong>\u2013 Although this is a major issue, it often gets overlooked. Changing the links and the URLs implies:<\/p>\n \u2022 Moving content from a sub-folder to a sub-domain or vice-versa<\/p>\n \u2022 Changing the name of a sub-folder<\/p>\n \u2022 Changing the actual page slug in the URL<\/p>\n Some best practices in changing URLs are as follows:<\/p>\n \u2022 A URL structure should be kept as is unless it is really needed to modify it.<\/p>\n \u2022 Identify pages with link equity pointed to them and have a relevant page to redirect these pages or have a permanent 301 redirect in place.<\/p>\n \u2022 Subfolders are preferable than sub-domains for SEO purposes.<\/p>\n \u2022 Create a good 404 with links to relevant information.<\/p>\n 4. Webmasters use new code with new features <\/strong>– A common problem is that webmasters use code in their websites without considering SEO implications. For example, they hide previously static HTML content behind Javascript and AJAX. Many times it becomes necessary to make these changes on the website for reasons of higher performance and user experience and in such instances it becomes necessary to implement the changes in a SEO friendly way.<\/p>\n
\n\u2022 Mishandling new sub-domains – New sub-domains or first non-www sub-domains get mishandled and are not tracked properly.<\/p>\n