Will a website redesign hurt SERP's?

elcappy

Junior Member
Joined
Feb 4, 2011
Messages
119
Reaction score
41
Hey fellow BHW's,

The company I work for is looking to create a new website. It will be much simpler than our current site and a bunch of text will be gone from the homepage. Now we will be setting up 301's for our inside pages.

Will this new redesign get us deindexed for a couple of days and then get re indexed? I know our rankings will fluctuate depending on how well we do the new SEO, but I just want to know if we will disappear while google re indexes since we will be changing the site completely.

Thanks all!
 
Hey fellow BHW's,

The company I work for is looking to create a new website. It will be much simpler than our current site and a bunch of text will be gone from the homepage. Now we will be setting up 301's for our inside pages.

Will this new redesign get us deindexed for a couple of days and then get re indexed? I know our rankings will fluctuate depending on how well we do the new SEO, but I just want to know if we will disappear while google re indexes since we will be changing the site completely.

Thanks all!

Ultimately, it will affect your SERPs (possibly positively or negatively). There's also a good chance that the site will initially drop in rankings, and then crawl up. But there's no reason at all that the site will be deindexed.
 
Ultimately, it will affect your SERPs (possibly positively or negatively). There's also a good chance that the site will initially drop in rankings, and then crawl up. But there's no reason at all that the site will be deindexed.

Ah that's good to know. I know there will be fluctuation, as with any mild to major website changes. Let's see how it all plays out. Thanks again!
 
No you wont be de-indexed. But you have a good chance that you will loose the rankings because of the new design and even if the ranking goes down within a week or may be in a couple of days you will see the ranking back again.

You will not need to worry on the ranking factor of the new design but be sure you are not making your site offline, that is once your new design is complete than apply the new design.

About the 301 redirect factor, i might say it is a bad idea.
 
Last edited:
Ah that's good to know. I know there will be fluctuation, as with any mild to major website changes. Let's see how it all plays out. Thanks again!

You're welcome. Also, it may be a good idea to make the switch in one instance, rather than taking it down while you upload and configure a new site. I don't think Google will like crawling the URL and finding an 'Under construction' page or even worse a 404.
 
Nobody can be certain what will happen, but if you change up your site too much, you WILL drop in the SERPS and it's VERY likely that you won't recover (without doing additional SEO work). I read this story about a webmaster got lucky and made this site that turned him into a millionaire, used some of the money to redesign the site, and as a result, dropped off the serps and he never recovered from that. Just take that for what its worth I guess!
 
yea initially this will effect ur ranking negatively,but it will come back to it's original place within 3-4 days,u have to use the webmaster tools crawl errors option to see everythings running fine.
 
I often change my wp themes with very little effect, if that helps...(but I don't remove any of the contents etc...)
 
If you redesign the website with less onsite SEO than before, you will lose serp. Possibly wont gain it back.

If you redesign the website with more onsite SEO, you will dance, and go up.
 
About the 301 redirect factor, i might say it is a bad idea.

So what is your plan to deal with page name changes? These pages are still going to be in the SERPs until Google decides to remove them. You still want your customers to get to you.

Not doing this is a worse idea. If the URl for the pages will be the same then it is a mute point but I am guessing they will change from xxx.html to xxx.php?
 
The company I work for is looking to create a new website. It will be much simpler than our current site and a bunch of text will be gone from the homepage. Now we will be setting up 301's for our inside pages.

Will this new redesign get us deindexed for a couple of days and then get re indexed?

It's impossible to say what will happen, as it depends on a lot of factors. But if you make a smooth change, then should it not affect you in the long run (or get you de-indexed for that matter).

You might however see some google dance the first few month (depending on the size of your website).

Just make sure that your 301 redirect is in place and do make sure to make a good 404 page. Finally - use a tool to find broken links and correct them with a 301 or delete the links.

You might also benefit from working on your backlinks, because it will "force" google to visit your page and update the changes. It's very important to make deep backlinks to speed up the process.

Good luck with your new site :)
 
Back
Top