Great google ranking but developing new site

[oggy1]

Looking for advice on maintaining google ranking whilst introducing a new and improved web site.
I run a web site selling sports clothes and accessories which I bought 2 1/2 years ago. I bought the business as it was really well ranked with google for key and generic sporting words.
Since buying we have experienced year on year growth at a fantastic rate and its been a tremendous success.
The web site has been in need of a revamp (use OScommerce) and as a result I am having a new site built, going live in mid august. I was of the opinion that if not broken why fix it, and despite good sales it really is looking dated now. The new site however looks fantastic at the moment in development and should be a top notch site. Its being built by a good team of independent developers and designers.
My main criteria was that it kept is google ranking. Obviously if loses this ranking then it might look great but if nobody is looking at the site I'm not going to get sales.
The developers have reasurred me that they are going keep all the parts that keep it ranked so highly with google. However I'm concerned that by introducing a new site I will lose all this. It has been causing me to lose sleep for ages!!!!
Am I right to be so concerned, or should I trust the web designers. How can I be sure that I'm not making a huge mistake.
Many thanks for any advice.

[sirearl]

The answer is if they are not SEO experts NO.

Best to keep the original successfull site as it is.

And start the new site under a different domain on a seperate server.

You then have the option to divert traffic from your existing site to the new site.

Never kill the goose that lays the golden egg.

It may take time for the new site to achieve meaningfull rankings,but remember the average customer is not concerned with how your site looks.

They are there to buy your products and provided these are displayed with the utmost clarity you have forfilled the main requirement of an ecommerce site.

Earl

[precise]

Is it just an OsCommerce redesign or a completely new system?

Have you seen any of their previous work? If so post some links and I (or others) should easily be able to tell you if they have any experience in SEO or not.

You should ask them to list the exact ways they are going to ensure that you do not lose out with SEO.

Creating a new website with an improved SEO friendly layout, navigation and structure can really improve on an already successfully ranking website.

AT: Earl - Sorry buddy your suggestions are not quite right.

[crossdaz]

Never kill the goose that lays the golden egg.


If your site is way ahead of the competition then not so much of a problem, however, most web designers know how to make a site look good - but have no idea why sites rank well, if they are replacing a lot of text with pretty pictures then you need to be worried.

[sirearl]

Creating a new website with an improved SEO friendly layout, navigation and structure can really improve on an already successfully ranking website.



Not if its No1 it can't.;)

I would not dream of redesigning any of my successful sites.I just put up other sites to support them.

more bites of the apple.

Having 4 or 5 sites on page one of google dramatically increases your chances of a sale.

Earl

[precise]

Not if its No1 it can't.;)

LOL, no animosity meant BTW.

In this day and age though, with fairly main stream product websites that have a lot of competition (like sports wear businesses), not only does SEO need to be tight but the design, structure, functionality and importantly conversion rates have to also be good.

[sirearl]

LOL, no animosity meant BTW.

In this day and age though, with fairly main stream product websites that have a lot of competition (like sports wear businesses), not only does SEO need to be tight but the design, structure, functionality and importantly conversion rates have to also be good.

I may have missed something but "sports wear businesses" is in the bottom end of the competition market.?:|

Earl

[Tin]

Hi Oggy

Just some quick thoughts.

1] Have you actually asked your web designers to tell you what precisely is holding up your current rankings? If they can't be absolutely clear on this then you can safely hold the belief that maybe you shouldn't leave everything to them.

2] For starters, you'll need to port over any/all on-page optimisation from your old design into the new one. OsCommerce used to have a tendency to knock out excess code so having a bespoke site created should actually give you more options where you can assist rankings by making better use of important areas.

3] Backlinks. Links coming into existing url's. Either retain the existing url's or ensure that you permanently 301 current url's that have a value to any new equivalent url's that the new system creates otherwise you may be throwing away any link benefit that the exisitng url's have enjoyed.

Essentially, if you have any doubts about the abilities of your designers to transfer the design over without impacting negatively on rankings then you need to hang back and have a think before you move forward as it can be a really slow journey clawing back original rankings.

Hope that helps and good luck with things

Ray

[precise]

I may have missed something but "sports wear businesses" is in the bottom end of the competition market.?:|

8,950,000 for vw parts.

15,900,000 for ski wear.

[cmcp]

or cheap car parts, 94,900,000.

[Tin]

8,950,000 for vw parts.

15,900,000 for ski wear.

These figures don't indicate competition but merely reflect how many pages are in the index collectively for exact, partial and loose match searches and also includes a selection of pages which appear because of external anchor text using the phrases. A clearer impression can be had by doing the following search strings...

allintitle:"vw parts = 64,700
allintitle:"ski wear = 14,000

this still isn't the true picture and both strings take no account of external data

[sirearl]

8,950,000 for vw parts.

15,900,000 for ski wear.

Thats not what you said dumbo .:)

you said sports wear businesses.:|

well "volkswagen parts" has 7 times the traffic of "ski wear"

or if you try golf parts = 34 million.:cool:

So ner ner.:p.

Earl

[precise]

Or ski 108,000,000

[precise]

:D That's what he said dum dum

[oggy1]

Just to confirm. Its a web site supplying ski clothes and ski accessories, so its my quiet time of year. Hence a good time to do some work on a new site. I'm also lucky to be in a position to have a decent budget to put this project into place.
I have a designer who is creating the public facing interface and design of the site and a seperate programmer who is building the CMS. They are working together on the project.
If I dont update the site then it will start to look even more out of date and sales could start to drop off next season. However the new site could really be a springboard to a 'really' sucessful business.
If I put the new site on a seperate domain then surely it would take years to be picked up to page 1 on google. (existing site has been running as ecommerce site since 2003 so has had time to reach the top).
I have a massive amount of traffic to the site as a result of my google ranking, but could improve sales with an improved site - hence the reason for the new one.
My programmer has said that the new site will have a more SEO friendly layout, navigation and structure than the exisitng site.

[precise]

Although none of this helps our friend oggy1 though

[sirearl]

Or ski 108,000,000

well if thats your site http://www.crystalski.co.uk/index.shtml

congratulations,well done.:)

Earl

[precise]

Oggy, get him to confirm that he will be doing a 301 redirect of old page to new at the very least.<br><br>Tin's posts are of great value, not sure about the rest of us!!<br>

[cmcp]

Ask him to tell you (past "seo friendly") what he's doing to improve the rankings. A good SEO will be comfortable telling you the technical onsite modifications, and what offsite linking and articles are required.

I would second building the site to go alongside your current site. Use the corrent content as a template by re-write it, as you'll get penalised for duplicate content.

I wouldn't be worried about the new site taking a while to rank (it wouldn't be that long) I'd be more worried about the old content (and sales) jumping off the SERP cliff.

[oggy1]

many thanks for the advice.

The web site is the one that come out top on p1 when you put 'ski clothes' into google.

We were on p1 for ski wear until recently but dropped to p2 recently.

[precise]

I never knew forums were such dangerous places for advice?

[cmcp]

What are you talking about.

[precise]

Going sub domain is far better than going new domain if it is going to be a problem/risk/issue.

I have redesigned many clients websites and improved there SERP's using the same domain name but just improving the basics, it's not hard or risky if done correctly. As the moderator can clarify, or Tin please clarify.

[sirearl]

High Oggy you only need a little bit of SEO to get your ranking back for Ski wear.

You could do with a few more relevant links to.

Earl

[cmcp]

Well this is only opinion, from a dev (not SEO / SEM), but I'd:

• rewrite the pages in xhtml / css
• rewrite the product and category pages with mod_rewrite as .htms
• restructure the navigation with new anchor links to static generated pages
• restructure the category pages to get more text and info at the top and fill out the spaces
• get some footer text and anchor links on there
• get a sitemap on the go
• google sitemap
• fresh content in the form of ski articles, and a blog.

[cmcp]

and I've just noticed the product names aren't in h2 tags. That might help.

[Place of design]

What a load of old tosh

You need to do 2 things - make sure when somone clicks on a existing bookmark or link the equivelent new page is displayed, and keep up the good work in optimising the site code, which is clearly working for you at the moment. Yes you can do better then P1, you can be P1 for a range of terms, which is worth looking at trying to achieve

All you need to do is this:
1. Develop your new site
2. Make sure it has excellent on page and structural SEO. Make sure each page is marketing itself
3. Use 301 redirects for every single URL on the old site, to the equivelent URL on the new site

End of

If you do this you will maintain your backlinks. 301 redirects were designed for this situation etc. I have done this for various sites, and traffic/placement has not suffered. Infact overall inbound organic serches improved, because the on page SEO was improved

There is a slight debate about this - do you Aim for Position 1 on a single term, or Page 1 for a range of terms. People are not paid in P1, they are paid in cash. I suspect you will be happier with more targeted traffic from google (P1 or not)

[fisicx]

Even if you do redirects, if anything on the page has changed then your ranking could drop like a stone. That could mean something as simple as changing the order or posiiotn of your navigation.

I'd do as earl says and leave the sucessful site alone, get yourself a new skin by all means but whatever you do, don't replace the the old site with the new.

So although your designer/developer tells you they are building a great site, in reality you can say goodbye to all your ranking until google has indexed the new site (and that could take months with no garentee that you will end up back where you started).

[cmcp]

What a load of old tosh

Anyone who's suggested technical or strategical changes so far have justified their thought process, and exactly how their point relates to the OPs situation.

Outside of your own posts, maybe you could point out the old tosh.

[Cartoon Logos]

Can you get your developer to provide this 'guarantee' in writing?

[oggy1]

Massively appreciate all your comments. All this will be used to ensure a successful new site. The developer had previously stated that he will improve the site with the following suggestions. Is this enough to ensure a smooth transition ?

(One more question - a lot of comments have said that need to put it new site on a different url to my existing site. How do other sites do it succesfully if this is the case? Not all new updated sites are on new urls.)

Here the comments from my developer..

Every care will be taken to ensure the current tags are retained and your rankings can be enhanced by the following implementations:

1. Use of search engine friendly URLs e.g. instead of
skimarket.co.uk/product_info.php?cpath=88&products_id=83
it would be
skimarket.co.uk/boots/snowy

2. Use of valid markup. Running your homepage through the W3C validator
produces 30 errors. The new site will use more efficient and cleaner markup which is valid!

[sirearl]

Massively appreciate all your comments. All this will be used to ensure a successful new site. The developer had previously stated that he will improve the site with the following suggestions. Is this enough to ensure a smooth transition ?

(One more question - a lot of comments have said that need to put it new site on a different url to my existing site. How do other sites do it succesfully if this is the case? Not all new updated sites are on new urls.)

Here the comments from my developer..

Every care will be taken to ensure the current tags are retained and your rankings can be enhanced by the following implementations:

1. Use of search engine friendly URLs e.g. instead of
skimarket.co.uk/product_info.php?cpath=88&products_id=83
it would be
skimarket.co.uk/boots/snowy

2. Use of valid markup. Running your homepage through the W3C validator
produces 30 errors. The new site will use more efficient and cleaner markup which is valid!


changing the URL's of the existing pages will make sure those pages loose there rankings as rankings are given to each specific URL and all the existing links to the original page will be lost.

WC3 validation has no effect on ranking.

As a matter of interest how much are you being charged to have your sites rankings ruined.?

Earl

[cmcp]

Just to hammer home the understanding of Earls point.

You have a site that is ranking no 1 for your keywords. To change that site (which is what happens when you reupload the new one) you are jeopardising your rankings. Maybe not much, maybe not at all, but it maybe a lot. you just can't tell.

By building a new site on a new domain you can let that site sit in Google and see where it rests. Your current site will not be jeopardised. That is the only way to retain your current rankings.

[Tin]

How do other sites do it succesfully if this is the case? Not all new updated sites are on new urls.)

With care and due consideration as to what's underpinning your current rankings (which is why I mentioned this point earlier in the thread).

Every care will be taken to ensure the current tags are retained and your rankings can be enhanced by the following implementations:

Just ensure that...

every url title tag is ported across along with...
meta descriptions,
product short descriptions,
product long descriptions,
image alt tags if linking to url's,
header tags (h1,2 3's etc if used)
and individual page copy.


1. Use of search engine friendly URLs e.g. instead of skimarket.co.uk/product_info.php?cpath=88&products_id=83
it would be skimarket.co.uk/boots/snowy

Then make sure you 301 the old url address to the new one.

2. Use of valid markup. Running your homepage through the W3C validator produces 30 errors. The new site will use more efficient and cleaner markup which is valid!

Unless your current markup prevents efficient spidering of all pages (scripted out navigation links etc) then increased validation is unlikely to inherently assist rankings per se, so don't expect something that may not actually happen.

You've a difficult decision. If you've already got your branding inplace then putting a new site up on another domain might not seem a great idea like some folk have already mentioned but, it's also worth bearing in mind that a new domain can take an age to kick in with decent rankings and the prospect of updating the old site with the new one is likely to be smoother and quicker in transfering your existing rankings "only if due care is taken". If you have any reason to think all bases may not be covered then you might be better placed putting the new design onto a new domain and accept all the additional work that brings.

Ray

[zhangxiaoli]

Thank you for your post.

[TheSlackers]

Seriously, just don't do this if your business is based only on your google rankings!! It's just not worth it if your current site is working well. You might think it looks dated....so what?!