Redevelop and Maintain

A common question that clients ask during a consultation for a website redevelopment is "Will my search engine ranking go down after a redevelopment?" The answer is, no - as long as a migration like this is handled appropriately.

What's the Problem? If your website has been up and running for any stretch of time, chances are its pages have been accumulating page range and ranking position. The problem is that during the course of a redevelopment, it is not uncommon for content to be moved around and page names to change. We want to make sure that during this change search engines don't think that these pages just up and disappeared. Eventually search engines will re-index and re-position, but that could take time. That lost time could mean lost customers and lost revenue to a high-traffic site, and thus shouldn't be allowed to occur.

So, Where Did it Go? What needs to happen here, is to notify the search engines that the pages have not really disappeared, they've just been renamed. In order to do this, something called a 301 redirect is in order. A 301 redirect is a special message that your web server sends to a user (or in this case a search engine spider) announcing that the page still exists just under a new name. Search engine spiders then can update their indexes, and the page should keep its ranking.

A Word of Caution Now, it's important to note here that although the page will keep its current ranking during this process, there are other factors that could either increase or decrease placement, but that's up to the new design of the website and how it will integrate the content.

So, How is it Done? The easiest way to achieve 301 redirects during the migration of an old site to a new one is through the use of a .htaccess file. This is a special configuration file that Apache uses when serving up web pages. An example of what would be in this file is below:

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteRule ^old-page1.html$ new-page1.html [L,R=301] RewriteRule ^old-page2.html$ new-page2.html [L,R=301] RewriteRule ^old-page3.html$ new-page3.html [L,R=301]

You can also do matching based on regular expressions so that you don't have to list each individual page (if you have a ton of pages that need to be moved). Good luck with the move! :)