When you redesign your website, it’s a lot like moving.  You won’t throw out your back lifting heavy boxes and you won’t have to figure out how to maneuver your suddenly much-longer-than-you-thought couch around the corner to get to the door, but there are a lot of similar logistical problems. In today’s webinar, Improving Your Search Rankings During a Website Redesign, Mike Turner gave a comprehensive overview of all of them, but one in particular stood out:  Don’t reinvent the wheel, just redirect it.

A real-life move takes you from one habitable spot to another.  Much as you wouldn’t move without your treasured inlaid mint-condition doodlesnipper because of its immense sentimental and actual value, you shouldn’t move your site without a plan to take your search engine rankings with you.

Before you ship that doodlesnipper, you want to take a picture of it, just in case.  Similarly, you should take a snapshot of your keyword rankings before the move as baselines for your traffic after the move.  Because the doodlesnipper is large with many attachments, you need to make sure all the boxes are clearly labeled and that you have mapped out where all the parts are going to go in the new living room.  Those attachments are like the different pages of your site; when you change their URLs, you have to map out which old ones should redirect to which new ones.

Then the key:  301 Redirects. Much as you forward your mail from one physical address to another, you forward your old page visits to your new pages. You want to use the 301 Redirect rather than the 302 because you want the change to be permanent, lest the crawlers consider your new page just a squatter and not worth bothering about.

Redirecting the tens or hundreds or thousands of pages on your site is definitely a big job.  The good news is that you don’t have to hire a truck.