Changing your website - be aware
A while back, I was working with a client—one website for the Australian market and one for New Zealand. This is the type of company you would see in TV ads, so it is reasonably large. They were in the process of rebuilding the website on a different platform. After ignoring the advice from the SEO company (us), they moved one site to the new platform and saw the organic traffic from Google tank as if it were falling off a cliff. They didn’t understand how Google views pages vs. just the domain. Each page address, e.g., domain-com/page1.php, is different from domain-com/page1.html or domain-com/page1/, and those pages build up authority and trust individually. When you rename or change a page name altogether, you lose that trust. This also applies when you rename a page—you shouldn’t rename a page just because an SEO tool tells you it should be in a specific format. You can, but you need to set a redirect from the current page to the new one (and you do lose a small amount of value), so that needs to be reviewed for the benefit vs. reward. It was thought you couldn't migrate a large site into a smaller site without losing traffic, but you can (I have done it a few times); you just need to map the existing page redirects on the new site. So keep this in mind when you first format your site and set the site structure, and preferably stick to that setup. Or if your site is new (less than 6 months old), make the changes early and stick with them moving forward. There is always a risk when moving platforms, and there will likely be some change in ranking. Be sure to go through the training modules to get it done right the first time. And the client? We created a movement document for the second site with no problems :) Lesson learned!