Often times when sites are being re-developed URL’s change.  A page that previously read as www.sitename.com/about.html on the new site may be www.sitename.com/about-us/.  For a human user interacting with the site, this is seldom an issue (aside from the occasional bookmark that needs to be updated) but for a search engine, this can be problematic.  Frequently, lack of budget, or lack of the knowledge that these issues need to be addressed leads to a site’s page rank and search related traffic dropping upon being re-designed.  These problems will usually rectify themselves over time, pages get re-indexed, etc., but why wait, when a few easy steps can guarantee that traffic is re-directed instead of lost.

There are a plethora of great tools available to web developers that provide statistics on how a site is indexed and what kinds of traffic a site is getting.  Google Analytics has become the standard for tracking how users interact with a site.  If this tool is running on the original site, you’re golden.  If not, I would highly suggest installing it on the “old” site as a first step of developing the new site.  The data gathered from Google Analytics during the development period will ultimately drive which urls from the original site will be redirected to the new site.

We develop 99% of our sites with WordPress as the CMS.  The concepts we’re about to cover will work regardless of how you develop your site but this article assumes you’re using WordPress.  You’ll want a plugin to make this a bit easier.  Go download and install Redirection now, I’ll wait.  No really, I’ll wait, go ahead, do it now.

You’re back, good.

Now let’s jump ahead and assume that you’re ready to launch your newly re-designed site.  Log in to Google Analytics and go down to the Content Overview section of your dashboard (lower right).

Click on View Report – you’ll be taken to an overview page – at the bottom of that page, you’ll find a link that says view full report – click on that link to view the details.

From this content overview page, you can export the most popular links on your site to a file (.csv, .xls, .txt, etc.).  This file will be the raw data we’ll use to set up the redirects for the newly designed site.  Sort the file and identify all of the links that you wish to re-direct to your new site.  Log into your WordPress admin and click on the Tools sidebar then click on redirection.

This screen will allow you to enter in the original url (from the old site) and the destination url (what page you want to redirect to on the new site).  And the option to make it a 301, 307, or 307 redirect.  Additionally you can use regular expressions to avoid having to create every single redirection manually (check out the redirection site for more details).

The redirection site has many tutorials on how to use the plugin, how to write regular expressions and how to use it with other modules – it is definitely worth checking out if this article’s peaked your interest.

These simple steps will keep a newly launched site from dipping in rank after a re-design.