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Crucial Aspects to Consider Before Overhauling Websites

7 Crucial Aspects to Consider Before Overhauling Websites

Posted on: Feb 27, 2019 6 min read

The domain of online business is getting more and more competitive with the passage of time. Thus, businesses try out everything possible in order to stay ahead of competitors in the organic search results. The common tactics they usually try out include altering the CMS (content management system) and migrating to new domains. Sometimes, these strategies pay off and sometimes they don’t.

In this circumstance, a renowned search engine optimiser based in London shares some tips that you can follow while overhauling websites to improve SERP ranking.

Site architecture

One of the major considerations for professionals involved in SEO services is site architecture. In other words, site architecture deals with the way your webpages are organised. Ideally, they must be organised in a logical manner based on logical category page structure. There can be additional sub-categories if needed.

You may either continue with the current site structure to avoid drop in SERP ranking or may work on the poor site structure and improve it to boost your website’s ranking. Let’s briefly discuss the pros and cons of both the strategies in the following paragraphs.

  • Continuing with the existing architecture: This means that you will maintain the existing URLs and categories. If you’re merging webpages, choose your most popular URLs and redirect your old URLs to the new ones. It’s important to note that all 301 redirects must be performed from pages whose content matches closely with one another. If you fail to make the proper match, the redirected content may bring down your SERP ranking.
  • Improving or updating the existing site architecture: A ‘flat’ site architecture does offer certain advantages in ranking. But it is helpful only when all your webpages are just a mouse click away from the Home page. A flat site architecture requires no categorisation of web pages. This kind of site architecture ensures all the pages are crawled and indexed so that they’ve equal ranking opportunities.

Thus, experts from one of the best SEO services in London suggest that you should be careful when performing such actions. While updating your website to achieve better ranking, you should first review the existing architecture. It may not be properly organised because of which, you’re being deprived of the expected ranking boost. In such case, you can update the site using an improved taxonomy to secure the desired results. Make sure the content is also properly organised. It is just a myth that category pages contain duplicate content and so, must be no-followed or no indexed.

Broken internal links

Run a diagnostic test to identify broken links. This effort of identifying broken links proves helpful. It confirms that something is seriously wrong with your website though it doesn’t indicate what exactly is wrong.

404 Page Not Found

If you think 404 errors are error codes, you’re wrong. They’re server responses and not errors. A 404 response is normal whereas the lack of 404 responses is not.

Crawling using the original site map

Site crawling using a list of URLs including an XML site map is alright. Crawling with the same original site map provides a lot of insight about the new website. It’s also important to check the 301 redirects. You can have the best result only when you’ve a 1 to 1 redirect.

List the thin pages

When you switch over to a new CMS or update a website, some thin pages may be accidentally introduced to your website. Crawl the pages with an effective SEO audit tool to identify the pages that have thin or small amount of content.

Duplicate content

Under normal circumstances, this isn’t a big deal. Google automatically resolves this problem by choosing a particular page to rank. Moreover, the search engine also awards or assigns all the link signals to the chosen page from the duplicate ones. In such situations, you can use canonicals to make it easier for Google to identify the main content page.

Staging the site

Site staging is when you are making an identical copy of the new site in a different folder or server. The staged site is to be blocked away for search engines. It is even better to protect it with a password. After the new site is created, perform all kinds of testing on it to identify errors before making it live.

DubSEO is a top-ranking SEO Agency in London. Experts associated with it also suggest that you should stick to the points discussed above. These tips will help you enjoy a greater mileage in the near future.


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