Article Discussion: Preparing Your New Site for Structural Changes

When re-designing a website, there are a great many considerations that need to be made. On the whole, good webmasters catch the most critical elements, but one area that seems to get consistently overlooked is inbound links. Often times when the site is restructured, the fate of all of these links can get overlooked. Inbound links must be treated with the utmost respect since they direct visitors to your website and affect your PageRank as well. Links from search engines to your site need special care. If your server is returning a 404 for a link, the SE will eventually drop the link from its list and the replacement content may not get spidered for a long time.


Read the full article here: Preparing Your New Site for Structural Changes

It is a very thorough and clever solution to a problem that many large sites face when re-designing their websites. It maybe a little bit too technical for most of SEOchat users. The another aspect of structural changes, from SEO perspective, is the strategy to retain PageRank values derived from those old incoming links.

I've been burned by a redesign before.

Since that happened, I know draw out a linking map to account for every link when redesigning and also look at keyword densities. My last few redesigns have been much more successful with the proper planning.

Nacho - I totally agree. One of the first things I do is go to every major SE that has the capability and do a link check. I take this list and make sure that I have a place for it to end up on the new site. After go-live, I live with my head in the logs looking at the 404's and tweaking..