How to destroy your rankings in one simple step

So your site has been up and running for a couple of years and you are ranking well in Google for your desired keywords and you are getting a good deal of traffic, you are taking plenty of orders and life is good! You (or your boss) decide that you should invest some of the money from this new found success into a brand new site design to take you to the next level.

You hire some designers in to give you that fresh new look and some web developers to implement the new designs, it all looks good so far. You launch the site live and for a few days it looks good, you are still getting traffic and it’s still converting… then it starts to go downhill..

•  You start to notice that you are receiving less traffic
• You notice that you aren’t ranking as highly in Google for your search terms
• Your sales start to drop

You’ve made the classic SEO mistake, you’ve effectively removed all the pages from your site that had built up a level of trust and ranking with Google, all the backlinks from other sites that were contributing to your rankings are now pointing at non-existent pages. Your new design is seen as a bunch of new pages with no backlinks, no history and no trust, no wonder your rankings have dropped!

What’s the solution to this problem? Well the trusty 301 permanent redirect of course! A 301 permenant redirect is what you use to tell the search engines that you old page has moved to a new location with a new page and that you want to transfer all the backlinks, history and trust of the old page to the new page. Properly used 301 redirects can enable you to safely launch your new site AND keep all the search engine love that you have built up over the years.

For more on 301 redirects see this.

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