You’ve just launched your newly redesigned website. Whether it took years, months or weeks – the important part is you’ve finally arrived. You feel exhausted but proud - a true labor of love. Better yet, everyone who sees the new site loves it!
Then you get an email from Bilderman over in accounts payable saying he just did a search on Google for one of your key pages and you’re nowhere to be found. Damn that Bilderman. Why does there always have to be a spoiler? Assuming he’s wrong, you check for yourself just to be safe. Sure enough, that pesky little pencil pusher was right. You are nowhere to be found. You start frantically typing in other searches that you just KNOW you had ranked well for in the past and still – zip. What the hell happened?
We Feel Your Pain
Welcome to New Website FAIL. If you’ve ever experienced the misery, panic, stress and acid indigestion that comes from a website redesign launch gone awry, you are not alone. At Primacy, we’ve launched hundreds and hundreds of new sites over the last 16 years and no two are alike. However, there are a few primary elements that can help eliminate some of the key new-website-fail components.A Quick Hit List
In this article we’ll touch upon elements that can help you avoid some misery and let you save your bottle of Tums for flaming swamp master chicken wings:- Webmaster Tools and Analytics
- 301 redirects
- Sitemaps & Robots.txt files
- Duplicate Content
- Post Launch Audits
- 404 Errors
Domain Audits - Taking Inventory of Old and New
A good starting point is to carefully account for everything you had on the old site and all the new stuff you’ve just made. Pages, files and URL structure all need to be reviewed. Are you going from a .php to .asp site? Are your staff pages moving from “about us” to a new section called “leadership”? We hope that you’ve addressed this in the Information Architecture stage of the site redesign but if not, audit your domain. Make a spreadsheet (the detailed sitemap) of all your previous pages, by main headings or navigational level and then include all subsequent pages. Do you have PDF files or product images? You’ll need to catalog where they used to live within the detailed sitemap.Tools and Analytics – No Hookup = No Power
Want stats and tracking on your site? Better make sure Google Analytics is hooked up. If you missed this step, you’re not the first person to feel the sense of horror when you pull your first visitor report and find a big goose egg. Other tools such as Google or Bing Webmaster Tools are also important and can prove helpful during the launch process. And since both require either a verification or submission process, make sure to work with your tech team to get these setup prior to launch. Once you’ve got your XML sitemap, use Webmaster Tools to submit them directly to the search engines. If your url changed, submit a change of address from the old site to the new. Plus there are a wide variety of reports, from when and how deeply your site has been visited by spiders to where they’re seeing errors on your site.301 Redirects – The Art of Domain Transition
One of the most common problems during a redesign is if you change the names of your pages or adopt a new URL or directory structure. Going from about.html to about-us.html can seem simple, but it’ll wreak havoc on your rankings if unaccounted for. That’s where 301 redirects can save the day. First, map all your existing pages to whatever their new URL is going to be - think old sitemaps vs. new sitemaps using their full URLs. You can do this pre-launch, but you cannot implement the redirects until post launch. Explaining the technical aspects of how to redirect goes beyond this post, but for more, check out:- A great primer for beginner and intermediate levels on MOZ - http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection
- For the techies or more code savvy, try this from Search Engine Land - http://searchengineland.com/url-rewrites-and-redirects-part1-16574
Sitemaps and Robots
Once the new site is live you’ll need to create a new XML sitemap as well as a robots.txt file. What are sitemaps and robots? And how do you best do that? Here are some great links to get started:- Sitemaps.org explains what they are and their protocol: http://www.sitemaps.org/
- A free sitemapping tool: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
- For more on robots.txt files: http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html