LocalBiz Lift: Why Redesigns Sabotage Your SEO Rankings (And How to Avoid It)

It seems like most companies redesign their website every year or so.

New trends gain steam, so they want to be more ‘contemporary’ or ‘flat.’

Or new color schemes are en vogue. So every site you visit looks Asana-bright.

Everyone now wants to update their site on the same regular basis.

I love experimenting with new color schemes and trends, too.

Except for one tiny thing.

I hate redesigns.

Design updates are good. They allow you to incrementally make improvements to make sure your site is up-to-date.

But full-scale redesigns?

Where you completely overhaul the site architecture and page content?

You should avoid those like the plague.

I know that sounds surprising. But I’m going to share a few examples of how and where website redesigns go bad.

Especially when it comes to destroying all of the hard-earned SEO rankings you’ve built up over time.

Site architecture changes cause you to lose links.

There are hundreds of rankings factors for SEO.

But backlinks still reign supreme.

External links have been considered ‘votes’ since the beginning of (internet) time. Their quantity, diversity, and authority pass the most influence to raise your position in the SERPs.

Internal links don’t count for as much value. However, they do have a direct influence over someone’s website experience.

I’ll explain.

In 2011, Google Panda was released. It was one of the first reported cases where Google confirmed the use of qualitative factors.

They used a survey with questions like:

Would you trust information from this website?
Is this website written by experts?
Would you give this site your credit card details?
Do the pages on this site have obvious errors?
Does the website provide original content or info?
Would you recognize this site as an authority?
Does this website contain insightful analysis?
Would you consider bookmarking pages on this site?
Are there excessive adverts on this website?
Could pages from this site appear in print?

And they had people individually rate different websites.

Fast forward a few years, and Google also started taking user behavior into account.

They don’t just want to rank websites based on links or content length. They also want to look at the overall experience of that website.

They want to make sure that people find what they’re looking for.

So the better experience visitors have, the more credit the site will get.

What’s one way to ruin an otherwise nice experience?

Broken links that derail someone’s path through your site.

When most companies redesign websites, they start messing with the site architecture.

They create new pages and ditch old ones. Or they take content from one page and add it to another.

Then, they switch up their menus and navigation schemes.

It seems harmless on the surface. The new experience might even be superior to the old one.

But what they don’t realize is that they’re often creating a TON of problems for SEO.

For starters, site architecture changes can ruin hub pages you’ve worked hard to build.

These are like clusters of related pages on your site. And they can help increase your perceived authority on those topics.

Page-level changes also create broken internal links throughout the site.

You know the drill. You try to click on a new page to find related information, only to be met by a 404 error.

One or two isn’t a big issue. Redesigns, however, often create a ton of them all at one time.

For example, let’s say you’re redesigning a hotel or ecommerce website.

Chances are, you’re using a detailed parent-child structure to organize pages.

That means you might have “Rooms” at the top, followed by the individual types of rooms underneath.

The problem is that these structures often changes over time.

Maybe you come out with new products or services. Maybe you migrate old rooms into new ones.

One seemingly small change can often create a ripple effect throughout your site.

It might make perfect sense to move your featured rooms up a level or two.

However, any changes to your URL structures doesn’t create one or two broken links.

It can literally create hundreds to thousands.

Take blogs for example.

Let’s say you’ve worked hard over the years to create hundreds or thousands of blog posts.

But when it comes time to move over to a new CMS during a site redesign, someone wants to remove the date strings from the URLs.

Heck, all it takes is literally a single click inside WordPress to update Permalink Settings.

So yes, it seems harmless.

I’ve actually seen this mistake time and time again.

Poor, unsuspecting business owners who have their entire websites practically break.

Tens of thousands of page URLs break overnight.

And you know what happens to their rankings?

They drop like a rock.

Fortunately, Google Search Console can help you spot broken links under the Crawl Report.

My favorite tool for technical SEO audits is Screaming Frog.

It will crawl every page on your site, uncovering tons of on-site SEO issues.

For example, you can start by looking for the “Client Error (4XX)” report under Response Codes.

Most of these will be 404 errors, when the status is reported as “Not Found.”

So far, we’ve been focusing almost exclusively on broken internal links.

But that’s not the only way redesign changes can affect your site links.

Think about it this way.

Older, high-authority pages or posts tend to acquire the most backlinks.

The highest value links are also the hardest to get. These include editorial links, for example, that come from journalists or other influencers.

That also means you can’t control them.

So when your page or post URL changes, you will lose all of those external links, too.

This, again, happens all the time.

Permalink updates, moving the blog from a subfolder to subdomain, or even just new product pages replacing old ones can force you to lose all those backlinks.

The best solution? Don’t change old page URLs!

At least, not if you can help it.

Otherwise, another way to side-step this problem is through setting up 301 redirects.

These are ‘permanent’ redirects, telling search engines that the new page has now replaced the old one.

The Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin for WordPress is one of the most popular options.

It’s also incredibly easy to use. All you have to do is drop in the old “Request” URL and then direct it to the new “Destination” one. The only caveat is that redirects like these should be used sparingly.

What you don’t want to see, is something like this:

Loading up on too many 301 redirects can cause other unintended consequences.
And they’re usually a sign that there’s a bigger, underlying issue at play.

It means the site architecture has changed dramatically.

Here’s why too many redirects can also affect your SEO rankings.

Too many 301 redirects can cause slow page speeds.

“301” redirects have long been considered the best for SEO.

They indicate a ‘permanent’ change, as opposed to a ‘temporary’ one like a 302 gives off.

Either way, SEOs still feared that redirects would somehow limit the amount of PageRank that flowed through to the site.

Even Google’s own Matt Cutts once indicated some loss.

But in 2016, Google webmaster analyst, Gary Illyes, confirmed that all 3XX links pass full value:

30x redirects don't lose PageRank anymore.

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 26, 2016

Another Googler, John Mueller, confirmed the same findings.

Why does this all matter?

Because redirects are often now used to update websites to HTTPS. So some SEOs think this is Google’s way to help make sure people adopt it.

Last year, Google Chrome users started seeing new security warnings.

Previously, up to 70% of users would ignore website security warnings. So Google rolled out new ‘Not Secure’ messages for sites that don’t set-up SSL certificates.

Moving from HTTP to HTTPS isn’t as simple as you might think, though.

For example, you can just flip a switch inside Google Search Console to pick the ‘preferred domain’ of your site.

That way, you avoid potential canonicalization issues of your site recognized as two: a “www” and “non-www” option.

As discussed, any URL changes can cause you to lose links.

Architecture changes can break internal links. But you can also lose out on ‘link equity’ if sites link to HTTP and not the new HTTPS-version of your site.

Again, why are we harping on redirects?

Because too many can slow down your site’s performance.

And page speed has been officially confirmed as a ranking factor.

Kinsta ran a test on WordPress to see how redirects affect page speed.

First, they used Pingdom to run a page speed report with no redirect.

The page loaded in around 1.06 seconds. That’s a good score!