Paz
11-26-2006, 07:39 PM
hi,
I'm always advising people not to revamp their sites, especially changing their filenames and navigational structure, but sometimes it's unavoidable.
I'm following a loans site, which had a major revamp at the beginning of October with a shed load of new content being added to better target the phrase "secured loans". Since we knew this would hurt rankings anyway, we bit the bullet and completely changed the navigational structure, page names and just about everything. All of the 30 or so old pages were 301 redirected to the new ones with htaccess, and a PR7 paid link was bought to help speed up re-indexing.
Here's how it's gone so far in Google with our old keywords:
http://www.digital-m.co.za/images/secured-loan.gif
and the same pattern is developing for other keyward phrases except that the site is ranking for the first time for the phrase "secured loans". It's taken about 6 weeks for this (PR3-4) site to get back close to it's old rankings and I think in another couple of weeks it'll be there.
I know this sort of thing depends on the site's number of pages, backlinks, google's spidering behaviour etc. but I think 2 months out of the serps would probably be about right for most sites if you are considering a major site revamp. It's still nowhere in Yahoo and MSN though. Yahoo and MSN indexed the new pages quite quickly but the serps still hasn't recovered... MSN is still indexing the old pages as "This Object has moved here" Apache redirects LOL.
Cheers,
Paz.
I'm always advising people not to revamp their sites, especially changing their filenames and navigational structure, but sometimes it's unavoidable.
I'm following a loans site, which had a major revamp at the beginning of October with a shed load of new content being added to better target the phrase "secured loans". Since we knew this would hurt rankings anyway, we bit the bullet and completely changed the navigational structure, page names and just about everything. All of the 30 or so old pages were 301 redirected to the new ones with htaccess, and a PR7 paid link was bought to help speed up re-indexing.
Here's how it's gone so far in Google with our old keywords:
http://www.digital-m.co.za/images/secured-loan.gif
and the same pattern is developing for other keyward phrases except that the site is ranking for the first time for the phrase "secured loans". It's taken about 6 weeks for this (PR3-4) site to get back close to it's old rankings and I think in another couple of weeks it'll be there.
I know this sort of thing depends on the site's number of pages, backlinks, google's spidering behaviour etc. but I think 2 months out of the serps would probably be about right for most sites if you are considering a major site revamp. It's still nowhere in Yahoo and MSN though. Yahoo and MSN indexed the new pages quite quickly but the serps still hasn't recovered... MSN is still indexing the old pages as "This Object has moved here" Apache redirects LOL.
Cheers,
Paz.