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michele kevan
64 Pointsrebuilding an existing website
Hi, I wondered if anyone knew where I could find out info at treehouse which would help me sort out in my head the steps involved if you did a complete rebuild of an existing site. What concerns me about this is if a company has paid for lots of SEO in the past and has great rankings in google , backlinks etc, how can you rebuild the site without affecting their ranking? I am new to treehouse and would love to just be pointed in the right direction. Thank you in advance, Michele
3 Answers
Matt Campbell
9,767 PointsSEO has little to do with the construction of the site past, does the site load quickly and is it well coded. SEO relates to content and links chiefly, in terms of onsite SEO.
There's two types of rebuild in my opinion. One is redesign and build. This won't effect SEO as you'll be putting the old content back on the site.
The second is a content rebuild, rewriting the site basically. Key to this is identifying what keywords are currently being used and then using those same keywords in the same quantity as before.
Need to clarify which kind of rebuild you're referring too.
michele kevan
64 PointsHi Matthew, possibly more a redesign and build rather than a content rebuild , but I may have to change the pages and add in new pages. Excuse my ignorance here, but what happens to all their links - would I have to redo these, or are the links linked to the domain side of things?I would also need to do a hosting change.
Thank you for your response Michele
Matt Campbell
9,767 PointsThe links will be in the content or around the site. The ones in the content will look after themselves if you're moving content over.
The links in badges, adverts, pictures that aren't in content etc...you'll need to work these areas of the site into the new design.
Nothing is attached to the domain, it's all in the content of the site. Be it main content or images etc. A sidebar with trusted partners or affiliate sites for example. Each item in the sidebar is a link to that site. SEO links is all about building a network of trusted sites whereas in the old days, it was all about how many sites link to your site, incoming links. Now, Google is smart enough to realise that a lot of these sites, that you used to pay for the privilege, are just building numbers of links and are crap so deranks your page as a spammy page.
Have a read of this: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links