Site Redesign & Findability

Susan C. Litton

Art Institute of Atlanta

Why Am I Doing This?

To make changes to my psychotherapy site while minimizing the dip in search engine ranking.

• Site was built 6 or 7 years ago when tables reigned supreme and Flash was the "in" new toy
• Despite serious flaws, the site ranks relatively high in Google for a fairly large number of keywords
• New client inquiries have jumped drastically since putting up the site
• I've been afraid to make changes for fear of losing my PageRank

Overall Game Plan

How to Redesign a Site While Minimizing PageRank Dip

• Decide what changes you want to make to the site
• Decide which ones might cause a dip in PageRank
• For each item above, find solutions to minimize the effect of the dip
• Implement the plan

Desired Changes

Decide what changes you want to make to the site

• Move to a new hosting company
• Make susanlitton.com the main domain and bend-in-the-river.com the alias
• Change titles, URLs, folder structure to achieve better SEO
• Add title attributes to anchor tags and change link text to specifically target keywords
• Make necessary changes so the site validates
• Redo the home page so it's not Flash

Desired Changes, part II

• Add a site map
• Add accessibility elements to my tables (e.g., <caption>, <summary>) OR redo the site with CSS positioning
• Add longdesc attributes to pertinent images
• Redo the Photos page to omit or minimize JavaScript
• Convert the site to PHP
• Minimize the "PageRank leak" by using the "rel=nofollow" attribute on most external links

Which Changes Could Affect PageRank?

Determine which changes might cause a dip in PageRank

Server, Domain Name, File Names

Determine which changes might cause a dip in PageRank

• Move to a new hosting company
• Make susanlitton.com the main domain and bend-in-the-river.com the alias
• Change titles, URLs, folder structure to achieve better SEO
• Add title attributes to anchor tags and change link text to specifically target keywords
• Make necessary changes so the site validates
• Redo the home page so it's not Flash

Changing the Extension

Determine which changes might cause a dip in PageRank

• Add a site map
• Add accessibility elements to my tables (e.g., <caption>, <summary>) OR redo the site with CSS positioning
• Add longdesc attributes to pertinent images
• Redo the Photos page to omit or minimize JavaScript
• Convert the site to PHP
• Minimize "PageRank leak" by using the "rel=nofollow" attribute on external links

Site Redesign Action Plan

Ways to minimize PageRank dip for each of the items below will be discussed separately.

• Move to a new hosting company
• Make susanlitton.com the main domain and bend-in-the-river.com the alias
• Change titles, URLs, folder structure to achieve better SEO
• Convert the site to PHP

New Hosting Company

Do search engines search by IP address or domain name?

• Most say domain name
• Those who say IP address may be referring to smaller search engines and/or the information could be outdated
• Safest avenue is to assume IP address and plan accordingly

New Hosting Company: Strategy

Strategy for minimizing search engine dip while moving a site to a new server

• Upload the site to the new server
• Permanently redirect the old site to the new
• Watch your traffic stats on the old site for search engine spiders to see when they die out
• Once this happens, take the original site down

New Hosting Company: Redirects

Ways to redirect pages and/or entire domains

• meta refresh? No! Some search engines see it as spam.
• 301 Redirects
• mod_rewrite

Redirects — 301

Permanent Page Redirects

• Tells user agents (and spiders) that a page has moved permanently, giving both the old and new URLs.
• User agents will then update their data so they only return the new page during future requests.
• Can be done several ways, including creating an .htaccess file or putting the command directly in the code

Redirects — PHP Example

Permanently redirects one PHP page to another

This is the code for a single page. It will permanently redirect the page it's on to the new URL.

<? php
Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
exit();
?>

Redirects — An example of code for .htaccess

A simpler method if you have a lot of pages to redirect

Create a file called .htaccess in Notepad or SimpleText with the code below:

To move a single page:

Redirect 301 /page-to-redirect.html http://www.redirected-domain.com/redirected-page.html

To move an entire site:

Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/

Redirects — mod_rewrite

mod_rewrite: What it Is

mod_rewrite is an Apache module that rewrites a requested URL on the fly. It's more powerful than a 301 because there are more different conditions you can specify.

One great use for mod_rewrite is to make sure your hits aren't getting diluted because of "The Google Canonical problem." The Google Canonical problem refers to Google's tendency to see www.yoursite.com as a different site from yoursite.com.

Redirects — the Google Canonical Problem

Testing for the Google Canonical Problem

A way to test for this the Google Canonical problem is:

• Go to http://www.yoursite.com/ and see if your address bar ends up at www.yoursite.com or at yoursite.com
• Then go to http://yoursite.com and see where you end up
• If you end up at the same address both times, then you're fine. It doesn't matter which address it is as long as they're both the same. If they're different, use a mod_rewrite to redirect one form to the other.

Redirects — mod_rewrite Example

Using mod_rewrite to fix the Google Canonical problem

A mod_rewrite to fix it looks like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yoursite.com$
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301]

Changing domain names

New Domain Names

If the domain name you're switching to is new, leave the old site up along with the new one for several months while Google finds the new one. The same strategy we used for changing servers applies here — redirect the old site to the new until search engines find the new, then take the site with the original domain name down.

Changing domain names

Aliases

When a site has an alias like mine does, you can use mod_rewrite to make sure your hits don't get split between the two domain names. 500 hits on http://www.bend-in-the-river.com and 500 hits on http://www.susanlitton.com will not give you as good a PageRank as 1000 hits on one of them. Strategy is the same: create new alias, redirect old domain to new.

Titles, URLs, Folder Structure

This is another example of where 301 redirects are perfect. For example, if I decide to get in a few more keyword references by changing the URL of this page

http://www.bend-in-the-river.com/qapersonality.html

to

http://www.susanlitton.com/personality-disorders-questions.html,

I can redirect the first page to the second.

Convert the Site to PHP

Is index.html the same as index.php?

It depends. It seems that they're seen as two separate pages unless they're accessed with a URL with a trailing slash, e.g.,

http://www.susanlitton.com/

However, a link that goes to susanlitton.com/index.html is NOT the same as a link going to susanlitton.com/index.php.

Solution? More 301s.

Summary

It seems that when redesigning a site, almost all potential SEO problems can be solved by some form of redirect. However, it still pays to go through the following steps for each site you redesign so you'll have an overall sense of direction:

• Decide what changes you want to make to the site
• Decide which ones might cause a dip in PageRank
• For each item above, find solutions to minimize the effect of the dip
• Implement the plan

Resources

General

• Changing domain names & preserving rankings - mod_rewrite
• Moving to another web host or server?
• Giving search engine spiders direction with a 301 redirect
• Apache Redirects for SEOs
• SEO and 301 redirect (page and site redirect)