Have a site, that is ranked #1 for keyword gets 15k unique visitors a day but…
So heres the breakdown…Bought a site that is a e-commerce site…and is only getting a couple sales BECAUSE IT LOOKS VERY VERY OLD and its JUNKY with lots of deadlinks… I bought it at a low price because they werent getting anything out of it :), so I am going to redo it, but afraid of losing its ranking, what is best way to do that without losing its rank, its keyword is the keyword that is being searched mainly. And it has been a registered domain for 10 years, and has gotten the same amount of traffic the whole time. <snip/> suggestions?
I don't wanna blow it. and get 0 traffic... but it needs to start to monetize.
Thanks in advance..
Thank you Mittineague for your response, I agree and understand bots can only see the markup of the site (the tags and site structure).
But If I revamp the whole thing, and redo the structure, I may lose its Google links is my worry, unless there is a way to redo the site and still retain the links.
Very tough, need to do something because people coming to the site will not come back or come back to purchase products if the site is not up to date, that is the main reason why I have purchased it because I feel that If I “liven” it up a bit and make it alot better and add an affiliate structure to it, that patrons going to it will be more likely to purchase versus an old cruddy 1995 site layout haha
Search bots can’t “see” if a site looks “very very old” or “shiny new”. They see mark-up with the content it holds.
So you can fix the CSS right away.
As for changing the mark-up and content, I think if you fix things slow enough the bots will re-index the new without much change, though IMHO if you fix things quickly it’s liable to change for the better, not the worse. You may be worried about losing what you have, when what you can get will be a lot better.
And wouldn’t it be best to fix the broken links for the visitor’s benefit and not worry about the bots so much?
ok before diving into the actual matter
i think one big blunder you are making is
you dont know reason of your own success…why are you ranking #1 in SERP
is it bcoz of contents…lack of competition…site structure…sometimes may be good backlinks…unique contents…age of site(more aged means better crawled website in many instances)
so if you really mean serious business then dont be afraid to think that…you fear now losing visitors…but i say if you dont consider those things eventually you will any how end up losing it and you will not even know what you actually lost…
when you say no $ do you mean no coversion of visitors to sales?
for then i think information such as
from where are you getting your visitors? (SE or adwords or gaming forum etc)
what are you selling?
whats structure of your site
does make difference
so before knowing that if somebody answers it would be just wild guess…
so need those info as well
any way best of luck with your venture…
but i agree that not being abe to do anything with 15k vistors per day is not good…even if you signup for some ad publishers you may earn more than 50$ a day…but i know it is ecommerce site…(many problem having other ads)
^ Very good point. And perhaps the most important in terms of retaining as much of the good SEO as you can. Make sure that any of the old page’s URL’s still point to something. If you get rid of the “blue widgets” page but now have them in a “round widgets” page, make sure that the bots will be redirected to “round widgets”. Otherwise next time they go to “blue widgets” they’ll get a 404 Not Found (and scrap it), but with a 301 Moved Permanently they’ll update instead.
xonex - this is a perfect opportunity to revamp the whole site from top to bottom so you can make it work. Don’t worry about that SEO malarky, when your new site is ready just redirect the old URL’s to the new site/pages.
