Things to Think About Before Making Vital Changes in Your Website (Part 1)

Before you apply major changes to your website, you need to review the present status of your website. Consider its flaws, strengths, possibilities, and opportunities. You should identify what should remain and what should be migrated. Despite the changes, you will be able to preserve your rankings. Here are 2 things before you make changes:

Site Architecture.

• Check on how the pages are arranged. There are two things to consider:
  • Continue the present site architecture and do not lose rankings.
    • If you don’t want to lose your good rankings, keep the present site architecture. This means using the same URLS and the categories. Of course that is, if you are not changing the web pages.
    • If you want to integrate web pages, then select the most popular URL and then redirect the past URLS to the current URL.
    • Be careful now; know that 301 redirects are only done when the pages whose content has close equal to each other. If you do not match the redirect content, it will surely affect unfavorable ranking.
  • Revamp the old structure to improve rankings.

Improve the Site Architecture.

• Others think that a“flat site architecture” has an edge in ranking. A flat site architecture is when the web pages can be reachable in one, two or three links. Know that the web pages with not be classified. The idea here is to crawl all pages and index them to have an equal ranking chance.
• A flat site structure may not be a great idea as a website ranks for many phrases.
• Contrasting pages are most likely good for different phrases. What makes sense though, is arranging the website in different categories. Therefore, if you are improving your website, it is good to review your site architecture. If what you had is disorganized then, upgrading your site with a great category structure will surely work better.
• It is, likewise, a great idea to have organized content because it has a greater chance of ranking well. When it is arranged well within the categories, they will all interlinked resulting to a significant context to each other.
• A well-thought-of category page is a great page to showcase the general questions.
  • An example would be a general search for “tv,” which is greatly gratified by using a general category page regarding “flat screen TVs”. That is what Google is inclined to rank. Now, when you search for “flat screen TV,” it will show the general pages about flat screen TVs. Observe how Google ranks the common type product searches. Search with common two word phrases and see how Google ranks it.
  • This, of course, is against the usual SEO misconception that category pages have identical content and no indexed followed. This is the wrong way of approaching it.

During a Google Webmaster office-hours hangout, John Mueller shared the importance of NOT using a noindex,follow tag:

 “So it’s kind of tricky with noindex. Which I think is somewhat of a misconception in general with the SEO community, in that, with a noindex and follow, it’s still the case that we see the noindex.

And in a first step we say ok we don’t want this page shown in the search results. We’ll still keep it in our index. We just won’t show it. And then we can follow those links.

But if we see the noindex there for longer then we think, this page really doesn’t want to be used in search. So we will remove it completely. And that we won’t follow the links, either.”

…noindex and follow is essentially kind of the same as a noindex, nofollow.”