Implications on search engine optimisation when you launch a new website

Very few companies realise this but it's dangerous to just launch a new website without thinking of how it will impact your standing with the search engines.

Bearing in mind that Google and co only re-index your website periodically, there will be a period between you launching your new site and Google updating its index, where people may be finding your website on the search engine results page, clicking on your site and it going nowhere.

This will be because the search engine's index still refers to the web addresses of all your old pages, not good.

This could go on for a while depending on how often your site gets re-indexed, but it could be months.

Months of missed opportunity where people would have found your website through a search engine, but then ended up looking at a 'page not found' error message.

This will also not score you any points with Google as a trusted site because they'll see your site as unreliable. How are they supposed to know you've launched a new website? To the Google system it just looks like your website has a load of holes in it where pages used to be.

Also there are other knock on effects when launching a new website such as any other sites that have linked to yours.

These links will become broken when the page they were pointing to no longer exists. Those incoming links may have been helping to maintain a particular ranking in Google that you were taking for granted.

There is a correct procedure when launching a new site though. A procedure in which you can be sure none of your old links will be broken and that your positioning within the search engines will not be affected as much.

Normally we SEO professionals don't like web pages that automatically redirect visitors to another site or page. We don't like them because they may look to Google like they are black hat (aka naughty, aka banned) SEO techniques, so as an ethical search marketing company we stay well clear.

There is however a redirect that we use in certain circumstances. The redirect we use is known as a 301 redirect.

Now 301 is just the code for it in computer language but in English it translates into 'this page has been permanently moved'.

This is a much more search engine friendly redirect than say a 401 redirect, but lets not get into the detail of that right now.

So what we need to do when carrying over the kudos from the old site to the new site is to create 301 redirects and name them exactly the same as the pages on the old site. Each of these 301 redirects will redirect the visitors browser to the new page on the site that replaced it.

So say we had a page on our old website that was:

www.uprightsolutions.co.uk/aboutus.asp

... which was the address of our 'About Us' page. Then say we look at our new site and the address of our new about us page is:

www.uprightsolutions.co.uk/About-Us/

The page address will often be different if you've changed the platform your website is based on or if your new website is based on a different technology.

In the above example we would create a very simple file called aboutus.asp and inside that file place the code for a 301 redirect.

All this does is adds a bit in the header of the page to tell whoever is trying to visit the page that it has moved to a new address.

There are other ways of doing this but we're advising the use of 301 redirect for search engine friendly effects.

The result of this exercise is that now if someone searched google for 'upright solutions' and the page www.uprightsolutions.co.uk/aboutus.asp came up in the search results, if someone clicks on it they would be redirected to www.uprightsolutions.co.uk/About-Us/.

This also means that when the search engines revisit the site to check if the aboutus.asp page is still there or has been updated in any way, they will also be redirected to the new About-Us page which they can then use to update the index.

Ultimately after the search engines have found the new version of the page, it will be the new page address that starts coming up in the search results, meaning no potential website visitors will be lost.

One very important thing for me is to do this page by page because what I have seen in the past is that we've given this advice to clients, they've seen a short cut and just redirected all their old page addresses to their new home page.

This saves time because it's easier to implement but I say it's a bad idea. Mainly because when someone searches Google say for 'ping golf clubs', they will see a link to the ping golf clubs page that was on your old site, but when they click on it, they'll be presented with the sites home page with anything and everything on it.

This is likely to create enough friction to make the visitor click back and choose another site from the search results.

When a person searches for 'ping golf clubs' or something specific like that, they are telling you what they are looking for.

If they wanted to be presented with a page offering a whole range of golf items, they would have searched for 'golf equipment' or something generic.

So take the time to maintain the users experience and redirect them to the right place.

If you need further help with the impact on your search engine ranking when launching a new website, give us a call and we'll give you some advice.