Question:

We have recently updated our website with a whole new redesign which we are really happy with. We were getting some great rankings for the old site even though it was ugly to look at so in SEO terms we must be doing something right! Now that we’re about to re-launch the site with the brand new graphics, most of the file names have changed so I’m worried I will lose all our SEO benefit. How do we get search engines to re-index the pages as soon as possible?

Emma, Newcastle

Hi Emma,

Your problem is quite a common one and has a relatively simple solution (or solutions). But we’re glad you asked because too often this is overlooked in the excitement of launching a new site. The easiest way to solve the issue is to do a permanent (this is very important) 301 redirect on all affected URLs. Your web developer will be able to do this for you (usually via the .htaccess file) but make sure it is a permanent redirect and not temporary. As an extra safeguard you could submit a sitemap with all the new URLs to Google.

There is another method as well which has been mooted by a guy called Greg Boser which is that you 301 redirect all the old files to the new ones, and then submit a sitemap using the OLD URLs; this apparently causes Google to try and re-index them and the 301 immediately tells them the new URL. We have not tried it this way yet but it sounds interesting. If anyone has any experience with this, or if anyone wants to be a brave heart and experiment with this, please get back to us with your findings.

Kind regards,

LeadGenerators

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