I recently moved my site from one domain to another, set it all up and submitted it to google.
Now I am considering rebuilding the site once again, at the same domain, but recreating the site again from scratch, so the url’s to all my content would change.
Would this create problems for me with google? Does google penalize a site for this kind of instability?
It won’t have done you any good, I can say that … as to whether it will have had a huge impact, that depends how many deep links you have into the site and whether you already had much ranking on your inner pages.
Yes, the home page is the most important one to redirect, and the spiders will find their way around your new site structure from there and will index it, but that takes a bit of time. Putting a 301 on all pages makes it easier and quicker for them to do that, and reduces the risk of people not finding your site. Obviously sometimes when you restructure a site, there isn’t a simple page-to-page redirection, and in that case you just have to find the best match you can.
I may have screwed up royally. When I moved my site from one domain to another last month, I created a proper 301 redirect for my root url, but not for the individual posts. Is this what you mean?
If you set proper 301 redirects, so that anyone going to the old URLs gets taken immediately to the most relevant new page, it shouldn’t make too much difference. You might take a small drop in your search rankings while the spiders find their way around the new structure, but it will only be minor.
If you don’t set the redirects and you just let old pages (a) remain in place, out of date, or (b) give a 404 error, then not only will search engines drop you like a stone but anyone who’s got a link or bookmark to one of your old pages will be completely lost as well.
This is what I’ve done, and let me tell you, it’s a big mistake. If your site is ranking very good for certain keywords, and you change any of the following:
you ranking will surely get knocked off. I suggest you to do all the research work before you publish a page, to avoid making any further changes.
Karan
That’s a very good point. If your site is already doing well, you should question why you are making that kind of major change.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it! There may be very good reasons for making large-scale or structural changes, such as moving to a better hosting arrangement, improving the usability of the site, or believing that shifting the focus of your site will give a better ROI overall. Those are all perfectly valid reasons, but you have to bear in mind that you might take a hit in your search rankings in the short term, and factor that in.
There have been some increasing reports (ex. WMW) where people changed the design of their sites, and they lost rankings for important keywords. I can neither confirm or deny if this is the reason, but there are definitely some reports of late of ranking loss just by simply changing the layout.
Thanks again everyone. I’ve got my redirects all sorted out now, as the 301 i had set up was somehow missing the foreward slash at the end of the .com. My hosting company was baffled by it because they said it should add that automatically. Anyway now all my articles from the old domain are being redirected to the same articles at the new domain.
My reason for moving the site originally from one domain to another was that I finally figured out my brand identity once and for all, and my new domain contains the main keyword search terms. My seo in yahoo skyrocketed within two weeks from being ranked in the 300’s to being number 36 for the keyword search. I haven’t checked google yet.
Anyway all in all it was a good move, and now i just have to wait for google to reach whatever ranking it is going to give my site at the new domain.
Thanks for responding. Yes, this I understand, and I’m willing to lose those page ranks. But I’m more concerned with some other kind of penalization from google for repeatedly recreating my site, some kind of “instability” factor that google may take into account…
If your internal pages have pagerank (not always visible), then you will be throwing away pagerank that you have earned. It would be better to plan to keep these urls working, but simply work them into the look and feel of the site.