Things to Think About Before Making Vital Changes in Your Website (Part 2)

Before you start on redesigning your website, you might wanna pause and think about it. Consider the pros and the cons if your decision. Try to identify your website’s strength and weakness because you will know what should remain and what should be removed. On top of this, you would also want to preserve your online rankings. Here are 7 things to consider:

• Examine if there are broken internal links.

  • This only shows you that there is a major error with the changes you made in your website. It is after all a diagnostic test; but, remember it cannot tell you what is wrong.

• Look for 404 Page Not Found Responses.

  • A lot of people thinks that 404 response codes “error codes” which they are not. They are actually server responses and it is normal but the lack of it is not.
  • So, when you crawl into a website and sees the 404 response codes, it may mean that something went wrong. It is, after all a tool that helps discover errors.

• Use Original Site Map to Crawl New Site

  • To find problems in the new site, examine 301 redirects and make it sure that there is a 1 to 1 redirect. Google only reward ranking signals that are not alike between pages.

• Spot thin pages.

  • Change to a more current SMS because if you don’t, you might have thin pages and Google consider this type the kind that has little or no content at all.
  • There are many good content management systems out there and you can select one that gives you the means to improve and control your site even if your technical knowledge is average. Scan every page with an SEO audit tool and find pages that has a little amount of content.

• Duplicate Content.

  • Google categorizes by picking one page to rank and granting the link signals coming from the copied page to the selected page.
  • To make this activity easier, use canonicals to give search engines a clue as to which of the pages is the main page for the content. This will help improve your site’s SEO.

• Stage your Site.

  • This means making an exact copy of its new site but in a different folder or server. This should be blocked to search engines and you should protect it by using a password. When you are done, try it out to find the mistakes before doing the changes.

• Try and Diagnose Your New Site.

  • The suggestions above are the vital factors you should think about when you want to make major changes in your website. It may not be complete because in actuality, there are many tweaky things you should be aware of.
  • A few examples like creating two or three backups to be added to the list. Make sure that the images and files will be downloaded by means of correct procedure. This will ensure that your files will not be corrupt.

Of course there are many possible errors, but the list above will help you improve your rankings despite the changes. You can catch up on part 1 right here.