Site Redesign & Findability

A Research Project

Why Research Site Redesign & Findability?

I have a confession. For years, I’ve been afraid to do much of anything to a site I built for my psychotherapy practice despite the fact that it has serious flaws. I built the site when I was “just” a psychologist before I had any formal training in Web design or coding. When I think of it that way, the site strikes me as pretty darn good. However, now that I have almost 4 years of formal training in Web design, it’s a total embarrassment among my geeky friends. There are problems with the site that any savvy developer would spot in an instant. And that’s on the surface. God help anyone who looks under the hood.

Despite all of that, however, the site consistently gets fairly high rankings in Google and my new client inquires have jumped dramatically since launching the site. Until recently, I haven’t known what things might upset the precious Google balance and rather than research the question, I had just decided to never touch the site again and live with the embarrassment. I’ve changed the copyright date each year (ok, MOST years), and that’s the extent of it. However, a recent class in Findability taught by Aarron Walter has given me the tools I need to make changes and probably get my Google PageRank even higher.

Overall Game Plan

The following is an overall game plan for minimizing PageRank dip when you have a fairly high ranking site that you want to redesign:

  • Decide what changes you want to make to the site
  • Determine which changes might cause a dip in PageRank
  • For each of the items above, find solutions to minimize the effect of the dip
  • Implement the plan

Desired Changes

The site I’m wanting to redesign is at www.bend-in-the-river.com. I actually haven’t used that domain name for years, and instead, I refer to the site by its alias, which is www.susanlitton.com. I came up with the following list of changes I’d like to make to the site. Some of these changes were chosen to help increase my PageRank. Other changes are things I’ve been wanting to do for different reasons.

Proposed List of Changes

  1. Move the site to a different hosting company
  2. Make www.susanlitton.com the main domain name and www.bend-in-the-river.com the alias
  3. Change titles, URLs and folder structure to achieve better SEO
  4. Add title attributes to anchor tags and change link text to specifically target keywords
  5. Make all necessary changes so the site will validate
  6. Redo the home page so it’s not Flash
  7. Add a site map and submit that to Google
  8. Add accessibility elements to tables (e.g., <caption>, <summary> OR redo the whole site with CSS positioning
  9. Add longdesc attributes to pertinent images
  10. Redo the photos page to omit JavaScript or convert to unobtrusive JavaScript
  11. Convert the site to PHP
  12. Minimize the “PageRank leak” by using the “rel=nofollow” attribute on most external links

Changes Which Might Cause a Dip in PageRank

Of the items above, only #1, 2, 3 and 11 could conceivably cause PageRank dips, so we have the following list of items we need to find solutions for:

We’ll discuss an action plan for each of these items separately.

Move the Site to a Different Hosting Company or Server: Strategy

The real question here is whether search engines search by IP address or domain name. Although most people agree that they search by domain name, I found a few references that said at least some search engines search by IP address. I decided to assume they search by IP address and then I’d be covered either way. A general strategy for how to move a site and minimize PageRank dip is:

  • Upload the site to the new server
  • Permanently redirect the old site to the new
  • Watch your traffic stats on the old site to see when search engine spiders die out
  • Once this happens, take the old site down

The next question to consider is how to effect the site redirection. One thing you should NOT do is a meta refresh, since some search engines see those as spam. The two possibilities we’re left with are 301 redirects and mod_rewrite.

301 Redirects

A 301 redirect tells user agents (and more importantly, spiders) that a page has moved permanently. The neat thing about this is that when a user agent encounters a 301, it updates its files so that they will only return the new page in response to future requests. 301s can be implemented several different ways, including creating an .htaccess file or putting the command directly in the code.

An example in PHP of how to write a 301 to permanently redirect one page to another is:

	<? php
		Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
		Header( "Location: http://www.new-url.com" );
		exit();
	?>

An example of using .htaccess to redirect a single page with a 301:

	Redirect 301 /page-to-redirect.html
	http://www.redirected-domain.com/redirected-page.html

An example of using .htaccess to redirect an entire site:

	Redirect 301 / http://www.example.com/

mod_rewrite

mod_rewrite is an Apache module that rewrites a requested URL on the fly. It’s more powerful than a 301 because there are more different conditions you can specify. One great use for mod_rewrite is to make sure your hits aren’t getting diluted because of “The Google Canonical problem.” The Google Canonical problem refers to Google’s tendency to see www.yoursite.com as a different site from yoursite.com.

A way to test for this the Google Canonical problem is:

  • Go to http://www.yoursite.com/ and see if your address bar ends up at www.yoursite.com or at yoursite.com
  • Then go to http://yoursite.com and see where you end up
  • If you end up at the same address both times, then you’re fine. It doesn’t matter which address it is as long as they’re both the same. If they’re different, use a mod_rewrite to redirect one form to the other.

A mod_rewrite example to fix the Google Canonical problem is:

	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.yoursite.com$
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301]

Minimizing PageRank Dip While Changing Domain Names: Strategy

If the domain name you’re switching to is new, leave the old site up along with the new one for several months while Google finds the new one. The same strategy we used for changing servers applies here — redirect the old site to the new until search engines find the new, then take the site with the original domain name down.

When a site has an alias like mine does, you can use mod_rewrite to make sure your hits don’t get split between the two domain names. 500 hits on http://www.bend-in-the-river.com and 500 hits on http://www.susanlitton.com will not give you as good a PageRank as 1000 hits on one of them. Strategy is the same: create new alias, redirect old domain to new.

Minimizing PageRank Dip While Changing Titles, URLs and Folder Structure: Strategy

Obviously, changing poorly chosen titles, URLs and folder names will help PageRank, not harm. However, it still seems prudent to take the necessary steps to make sure Google and other search engines find the new pages and spider them. This is another example of where 301 redirects are perfect. For example, if I decide to get in a few more keyword references by changing the URL of this page

http://www.bend-in-the-river.com/qapersonality.html

to

http://www.susanlitton.com/personality-disorders-questions.html,

I can use a 301 (or a mod_rewrite) to redirect the first page to the second.

Minimizing PageRank Dip While Converting the Site to PHP: Strategy

The question here is whether, for example, index.html is the same as index.php. The answer is: It depends. In general, they’re seen as separate pages unless they’re accessed with a URL with a trailing slash. For example, if links to my home page are written as

http://www.susanlitton.com/

a search engine will look for whatever index or home page I have in my root folder. If it’s index.html one day and index.php the next, it won’t matter.

However, a link that goes to susanlitton.com/index.html is NOT the same as a link going to susanlitton.com/index.php. Solution? More 301s or mod_rewrites.

Summary

It seems that when redesigning a site, almost all potential SEO problems can be solved by some form of redirect. However, it still pays to go through the following steps for each site you redesign so you’ll have an overall sense of direction:

  • Decide what changes you want to make to the site
  • Decide which ones might cause a dip in PageRank
  • For each item above, find solutions to minimize the effect of the dip
  • Implement the plan

Resources

This research project was originally presented as a slideshow. If you’d like to see the slideshow, you can launch it here.