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Site Rebuild for a client - How NOT to get kicked off google
I had a call recently from the father of a client who’d had his website “re-designed” by his current web designer as a bit of a favour. The company is known as “Dave the fence” and he’s been doing nationwide electric fence contracts for years and doing quite well out of his website for enquiries and so on.
Dave the fence, called me and asked if I could do something about him being “removed from google” as he put it. He was interested in what I could do as I’d been doing some good work for his son over at www.jobmortgages.com (Mortgages for Police).
I’ll be working on Dave’s electric fencing website when he returns from holiday but I just wanted to point out the dangers in re-designing your site and not taking into account all the work that’s been done to get it in the google rankings. Clearly Dave was suffering from this as he’d stopped getting enquiries from the website since the redesign. (Some favour!)
Anyway the process I was going through with Mark at www.JobMortgages.com was pretty solid and made allowance for the fact that the old site had some strange page names and some not so great meta tags etc.
I redesigned the site for him and added in all the meta tags he needed to get some google search rank going. One little tip you might keep in mind when re-doing a site and optimising page names and URLs for the new site is to redirect the old pages to the new and relevant URLs thus quickly telling google that the content has moved and not loosing any of the knowledge already built up over the last year. It’s pretty simply to put in place a dot HT Access file with a 301 permanent redirect instruction list for the old to new page redirects.
That’s what had been missed out when Dave the Fence had his site redesigned. It’s not the whole story but it was a significant factor in the site getting de-ranked in google.
The moral of this little story is, make sure you plan well for any site updates and redesigns and include some time to figure out the SEO implications.
