Ep13 – How to Keep Your Rankings In Google When Updating Your Website

Podcast – SEO Point

Transcription

John: Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Works Media Podcast, I’m your host John Romaine and joining me is…

Byron: Byron Trzeciak.

John: This is Episode Number 13 and in today’s Podcast we’ll be talking about how to preserver your rankings in Google when you go about either shifting hosts or upgrading your Web site. How you going Byron?

Byron: Good John, how are you mate?

John: Good, back again for another exciting week.

Byron: Back again!

John: Another 40 minutes or so having to listen to me waffle on with nonsensical Internet marketing and SEO advice.

Byron: Well, you know, I’m still here so the – I must be a good listener or something.

John: Yeah.

Byron: Must be part of the induction program I recon, you sit someone down, let them listen to you and see if they’re still awake.

John: Something like that. Well you are still here and I’m glad you are man because…

Byron: I appreciate that.

John: It’s a pleasure having you on board.

Byron: It’s been quite exciting this week.

John: And you make me look good too so that was…

Byron: Absolutely yeah, oh, well I was listening to a few of the Podcasts and thought, wow, I really am a great wingman, I make you sound awesome week after week.

John: See rule number one in business, don’t ever hire anyone that’s potentially smarter than you so you always look outstanding.

Byron: I don’t know what to say, I know that was a backhanded comment or complement there.

John: Don’t take it personally.

Byron: No, no.

John: You’ll have to excuse me, I just made a cupper so …

Byron: That’s what we do these days.

John: Make a – grab a cupper, slip on your favorite socks, kick back and enjoy the show.

Byron: Exactly.

John: All right.

Byron: I think – sorry John. I mean, this week I think we’ve had a bit of success, a few people saying that they like the show so kick it up, asking for questions and keep, hopefully, getting some feedback.

John: Yeah, I had some really positive feedback from a guy by the name of Paul from the United States. I forgot to ask him exactly where he was from but it’s always nice to know that people are listening in. I try very hard with these Podcasts to just get straight to, you know, the stuff that matters I know we probably waffle on for a couple of minutes at the beginning but I know one frustration of mine is that you might listen to a Podcast that goes for an hour long and there’s 45 minutes of, you know, trivial nonsense and 15 minutes worth of content so I try and avoid that and get straight to the meat and potatoes.

Yeah, you don’t make friends with salad. All right so…

Byron: Exactly, yeah.

John: Yeah, this week talking about how to go about preserving your rankings when either shifting hosts or updating your Web site.

Byron: I think most of our listeners would understand like why you might be upgrading or why you might be shifting sites so, I mean, why in general do we need to worry about rank preservation John when it comes to moving your Web site. Does it just happen automatically or there’s obviously some things that we need to take into consideration?

John: Well, firstly the why. A lot of business owners have probably found themselves in this position where they’ve been recommended or had the recommendation made that they should potentially look at shifting hosts or simply just updating their Web site.

Now, either one of those two things might have to do with the performance of their site and essentially – in fact, that’s probably, you know, what it will come down to as a performance of their site, is it too slow to load? Excuse me, is it not converting? Is the technology no longer supported?

Every now and then I’ll have a site that pops up that’s using some sort of component or add-on, you know, classic ASP or something like that where the host no longer supports the technology so they’re forced then to shift to say, PHP or content management system or something like that.

So – and this is something that happens all the time for a lot of business owners. We want to upgrade our site, it hasn’t been updated since 1999 and it looks tired and outdated, it’s not responsive, it doesn’t show on mobile, the site is slow or it – our hosting sucks. The site keeps falling over.

So all of these things pop up, you know, from time to time and when they do, you know, I think the most frequent one is we just want to update our site because it hasn’t been updated or they can’t log in and make changes so they’ve got to muck around in HTML or whatever, but it’s a common thing.

Byron: Yeah, and typically – yeah. I mean, typically that’s when the structures changing the most is when you’re upgrading from an old site to a new site. Sometimes if you’re moving hosting then the Web site could be exactly the same on old hosting provider or new hosting provider so I think in most cases when you’re building a new Web site this is probably something that you should take into consideration.

John: Absolutely and, you know, I’ve seen – I’ve spoken with a lot of business owners that have said, look John, you know, our site used to perform really well in Google and ever since we rebuilt it, it’s just – it’s just nowhere to be found. You know, essentially I always say can I have a look at the data, have jump into analytics and – or you could even look through SEMrush to sort of get an idea of the performance of the site as well as Webmaster tools looking at impressions but, you know, if I can get access to analytics I’ll do that and, I mean, so many times I’ve logged into an account and seen the data just fall off a cliff and I’ll say, what happened around say March/April? Oh, that’s when we upgraded our Web site and that’s when, you know, we stopped getting traffic and we can’t understand why.

And in almost every case it’s a matter of failure to set 301 redirects.

Byron: Yep, absolutely.

John: Probably for business owners a 301 redirect is just – I’ll try and break down in simple terms, but a 301 redirect is essentially saying, okay, this page, you’re telling Google, this page no longer lives here so for instance sake it might be somedomain.com.au/categoryname/pagename1. That page no longer lives there and a 301 redirect says, okay, this page is no longer here but it now lives here and the new location might be Page2.html. That’s probably a terrible example but the bottom line is a 301 redirect essentially tells Google the page no longer is here but it now lives over here. So, you know, even if someone searches for your site in Google and the old pages shows up, if they click on that link and you’ve got a 301 redirect in place they automatically get pushed to the new page. So you don’t lose any traffic and Google can go about updating its index to reflect those changes.

Byron: All right so what are some of the steps that business owners should consider, do they need to take into consideration some of these things before they’ve started building the new Web site or it is something that can happen once the new Web sites finished and then look at the differences between the two sites and how to implement those 301 redirects that you mentioned?

I mean, do you want to talk about some of the preparation and planning for – that goes into implementing these kinds of changes?

John: Yeah, I mean if a business owner is simply changing hosts, if they already have a site that is performing well and, you know, the site keeps going down because of terrible hosting and they’re not making any structural changes to their site anyway they won’t need to go about doing too much in terms of, you know, sitting through – in fact, they won’t need to do any at all. It’ll just be a matter of shifting and that’s when you go about updating your DNS settings and so forth just to make sure that your site continues to run.

But if you’re making considerable changes to the actual structure of your site, so if you’re moving from, say, esthetic HTML site that’s, you know, ten years old over to a content management system like WordPress then the structure of your site is going to change significantly and that is where, you know, you’ve – depending of course upon the size of your site, you know, if it’s a small ten-page Web site then that shift is not going to – it’s not going to be too difficult. But if it’s a large site, you know, 1000,000 pages or a quarter of a million pages or something like that planning and preparation is essential especially, you know, typically most large sites have a lot more traffic so you’ll want to do as much planning and preparation as possible in order to ensure that, you know, your site doesn’t fall off a cliff, you retain your traffic, you retain your rankings and everything continues to run smoothly so…

Byron: Yep.

John: In terms of planning and preparation some advice that I would give to business owners, if they’re thinking about upgrading their Web site and they’re going to make some significant changes, now is probably a good time to have a think about your hosting as well. Okay, are you happy with your hosting? Is your site fast? Is it quick loading? Is there anything about your current host that you know, you’re not real happy with, because if the answer is, you know, if you aren’t 100% happy with your current host and your site does frequently go down or it’s slow now would be a good time to think about shifting but probably the most important thing that comes to mind is – and this is a method that I’ve shared on my site, it’s called card sorting and that’s essentially where – I mean, this is a strategy that I like to use because I can visually see the structure of the site laid out on the desk in front of me and it’s essentially where you cut out small pieces of paper and you can map out or visually see the actual layout of your site; you know, Homepage, About Us, Frequently Asked Questions and then the subcategories and then the pages beneath that.

Byron: And we’ve spoken about that before I guess in terms of your Web site structure reading like a book and splitting it up into chapters so that it seems logical in terms of where your pages are placed and the other structural point of view is that you can kind of create those SEO friendly URL’s which just reading them from a human perspective you can kind of make sense, okay, I understand what that page is about just by looking at the URL as well.

So those are some of the advantages you get from sorting out site structure on a new Web site.

John: Yeah, I prefer the filing cabinet mentality because…

Byron: That’s a good example.

John: You know, you can file stuff in certain folders and everything sits where it should but your site structure is really important and, you know, if you’re going to be upgrading your site you’ll want to be improving it as much as possible as part of that process so making sure that, you know, like you said, your URL’s are search engine friendly and that you don’t have to dig through five or six layers to get to certain information so the card sorting method works really well for me but even, you know, just sit down with a pen and paper and sort of map it out.

Look at your existing site and say, right, where is this thing falling down? How can we improve upon it and sort of build out a new site structure that improves what you’ve already got.

So site structure and then, of course, once you’ve completed the actual framework of your site and you know what the structures going to be then you can start putting your – or building out your replacement site and the best way to approach this always is to put it on a, work on it, within a test environment.

So, you know, develop it locally and then upload to a test environment so, you know, while your old site is still ticking along upload to a test environment and that way you, colleagues, staff or whoever else, you can all look at it and do some low level testing and say, yep, this looks great, works on mobile, you know and you can go about doing whatever you need to do to ensure that it’s right, change your images and contact details and whatever else.

But also make sure that you set the robots to disallow all so that that isn’t picked up at all by the search engines while you’re doing that. That’s probably not going to happen anyway because it will only be there – unless your developments going on for months on end, most times that’s not going to happen anyway.

Byron: Yeah, yeah. All right, so you’ve got your new Web site structure and you’re ready to launch and you’ve got your old Web site structure there, how can we, you know, understand what redirects we need to put in place?

John: Yeah, you need to think about essentially what you’ll want to do and this is what I do is I get a snapshot using XML site map generator, you can Google it, and you can export a snapshot of all of the URLs and structure from your existing Web site and you can export that down into an Excel spreadsheet. And you’ll set your spreadsheet out in a way that you’ve to the old URL and then you’ve got the redirect URL to the right of it. So I end up with the one spreadsheet with two columns; the old URL and the destination URL – the destination of the new URL.

In some cases that might not change so with those you don’t need to do anything. With categories and pages that you’ve potentially removed on the old site you might do away with a whole section of your site, for those I generally just redirect those to the homepage of the new site. You know, that can get a little bit tricky in places but, I mean, you’ve got to send the traffic somewhere, right? You don’t want to lose all of that link equity and you certainly don’t want to lose the traffic.

Byron: Yeah, I mean I was going to ask you in terms of how important do you think it is say that bluewidgets.html points through to blue widgets on the new Web site or a better example might be that maybe there’s red widgets on the old site but you’re no longer going to have that on the new site so is it okay to redirect that to blue widgets on the new site for example, you know, how important is it to go send through to exact match sort of redirects if that makes sense?

John: Well if you’ve replaced the page with something else and you want to force it to the new location then set your 301 to do that. Okay, if you’ve removed the page because you either no longer, for whatever reason, offer the product or service, I mean, you’ve still got to send that visitor somewhere. You’ve got to tell Google what to do or what you want them to do.

So if – I mean, if you remove ten pages you’ve got to redirect somewhere so you may as well just redirect them to the homepage. Ideally you want to redirect them to something that is close. I mean, if you’ve, just for examples sake, flushed – if you were selling car parts and you flushed the whole series of say manifold gaskets or something like that well then you might want to redirect to, perhaps gaskets or manifolds or something that’s close. But if you’ve deleted a whole section and you just don’t want any of that information displayed anywhere as part of the change over then just redirect it to the homepage.

Byron: Yeah, makes sense.

John: So you want to be in a position where you have a spreadsheet that has your entire 301 process mapped out and ready to go so you’ve got the old URL and the new destination URL so that once the new site goes live you can then start implementing your 301’s just by referencing your spreadsheet, okay, you’re not sitting there going, clicking, around on the Web site and going, ah, where does this page need to go and, ah no, I’ve forgotten where – because especially for big sites it can get really confusing really quickly.

So it’s always best to make sure that you’ve got that 301 spreadsheet done and test it, make sure you test everything.

Byron: Yep.

John: Before you start going too far down the rabbit hole.

Byron: All right so once you’ve got your spreadsheet list what’s the next step that you take after that?

John: Okay so by this point you should have – I mean, the old site will still be ticking away. Your developer or whoever it is has completed the replacement site or the new Web site. You have that in the test environment and you’ve got your 301’s mapped out in a spreadsheet. From there it’s really important especially for big business that they put aside to schedule the change over.

So schedule a time outside of business hours to make the change over. I always, for my clients, ask them, you know, when is the best time for this to be done? We certainly don’t want to start taking sites down during peek times so whether that be…

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: …on a Saturday lunchtime or midnight during the week or something like that, I always try and do it on the weekends and I’ll say to business owners, you know, let’s – how about we do this on the weekend, do it on a Saturday night or something like that so that you’re minimizing the amount of disruption to the business.

Depending upon how big the site is, I mean, if you’ve got an FTP down the old site and it’s huge, the site could be down for, you know, a number of hours. So you need to take into consideration how big is this site? How long is this changeover likely to take, how many people could be potentially affected by the change over so always try and work towards minimizing that disruption. I think that’s really important.

So, as part of that process always make sure that you don’t just flush the old site, you keep a backup and I typically just FTP stuff down and just zip it up with something and keep a backup because if anything goes pear-shaped, you know, for whatever reason, you want to be able to roll back.

So, yeah, if you’ve got a backup there and something goes wrong with the new site like there’s some sort of feature or plug-in or technology that’s not yet installed on the development server or the server that you’re going to be going live on and it doesn’t work, then you’ll want to roll back.

So don’t – yeah, business owners should never just flush the old site, always keep a backup for that reason.

Byron: Absolutely. I mean, we touched on that a little bit in one of the last Podcasts about security as well and the importance of backups so, you know, I think for any businesses that are online and most of them should be, then, yeah, backups are just critical.

John: But you’d be surprised how many business owners go through this process and they don’t do any of this. They just pull the old site, go live with the new site, here you go, it looks lovely, payments made and then, oh wait a minute, we’re not getting any inquires anymore, what happened?

Byron: Yeah, especially like, as you say, when it comes to the bigger Web sites, I mean if you’ve only got a homepage then, you know, a lot of the time a large portion of the links are pointed at the homepage so they kind of come regardless, it’s all the other links, the service pages and content pages and things like that that tend to get forgotten about but all of those still have links as well.

John: Yeah, well that’s right. I mean, you’re talking about link equity there so if, you know, you’ve got some high quality in-bound links and they’re pointing to a page that you’re about to kill, you’re about to just disassociate yourself with those links. So you want to try and preserve as much link equity as possible by ensuring that your 301 anything, you know, your entire site, regardless of whether, you know, the page exists or not so make sure you 301 it. If you kill the page, 301 it to the homepage or 301 it to a page that exists but, you know, putting a site, you know, link equity, you want to preserve your traffic, okay, so that if anyone clicks on your search results and you’ve just upgraded your entire site and made significant changes, the last thing you need them to see is a page not found or a 404 error because the minute they see that they’re out of there so you’ve lost that lead or that sale, conversion.

Byron: Yep.

John: So 301’s are super critical.

Byron: Yeah, yeah. Yep, absolutely. All right, so, I mean, obviously we’ve talked about downloading and backing up the old site, uploading the new site, testing that the sites working and it’s in place. What do you recommend is the next step after that?

John: Well, there’s a plug-in I want to mention it’s called simple 301 redirects. I mean, I’m talking about WordPress here, popular content management system, most businesses will probably be running it, that’s a plug-in that I use. WordPress I’ve found can be really – it can begin to behave really strangely if you edit the HT access file directly. You know, ideally you want to be able to just copy your entire 301 spreadsheet, right, into – straight into HT access file so there’s no mucking around. You can just do a big bulk grab which is going to save you a lot of time. Simple 301 redirects is not as efficient as editing the HT access file directly. If I can edit the HT access file directly and it works then that’s my preference but WordPress can act really weird at times, I’ve seen all sorts of nonsense going on with WordPress when you start poking around at the HT access file directly. I don’t know why but, yeah, for big sites you probably just want to access the HT access file directly and for small to medium sites you can set your 301’s individually.

You know, there’s really no – I’ve had a lot of people say, oh, is there a quicker way to do this like not really, you want to make sure that you – roll up the sleeves, do the work and make sure that it’s done right because if you muck something up you’re going to be kicking yourself later. You’re best just putting in a few hours and making sure it’s right to begin with rather than having to sort out problems later.

Byron: Yeah, we saw once before John with, I think it was big commerce, was it? Which did automatically handle some of our 301’s for us but that was in more simple cases I suppose when you want to add the category to the URL, the product category to the URL, or something like that so the products not being deleted so really there’s no real way to automate it in the true sense when it always needs a bit of human forethought to be able to make sure that you’re getting it right and you’re covering all angles.

John: Yeah, see big commerce is good in that sense. It will set 301’s automatically but that only applies if you’re, say, already on big commerce and you’re just changing the structure but if you’re on, you know, if you’re running a simple HTML site and you go, we’re going to shift to big commerce well then you’ve got to start going through and doing them manually.

You know, much like link building there’s nothing sexy about setting 301’s but it’s time intensive.

Byron: Right, exactly.

John: It’s something that, as I’ve said, you’ve got to do and you’ve got to, more importantly, once it’s in place you’ve got to check. Something else that is worth mentioning is that you set your goals and conversion tracking and so forth up and just make sure your contact forms are working and if you’re running an ecommerce store make sure that you can do test purchases.

You know, if you need to take a day or two to work – to just test your site to make sure everything is working then do it. But, yeah, with your 301’s testing to make sure that they’re working you can reference – you can go back to your spreadsheet and just pluck out the old URL’s and just paste them straight into the browser; press Enter and then make sure that you end up where you intended to be.

If you get a 404 then you know you’ve mucked up somewhere in your 301’s so you can go back and just double-check that and fix it up. That’s probably, I don’t know, nothing else comes to mind at the moment. There might be – just avoid any sort of automated software just go and do it manually. Make sure it’s done right. I wouldn’t trust any tools.

Byron: Yep. Certainly Google Webmaster tools, as well, you can start getting some errors from that point forward if you’re not redirecting correctly as well so that’s always a good place to check.

John: We all know – actually good thing that you mentioned Webmaster tools because Google Webmaster tools will explode when you change or make significant changes to your site. So, you know, you’ll probably go about upgrading your site, shifting hosts or whatever else and then looking into Webmaster tools and seeing all of these, you know, warning signals and God knows what else in there and that’s because Google’s chucking a wobbly. We can’t find these pages, what’s going on. That’s because you’ve changed the site significantly, you’ve made big changes.

What I tend to do is I’ll flush all of the error messages once I’ve completed the change over and then I’ll go about submitting the site map, I’ll resubmit the site map and I’ll force a crawl of the entire site. As to how long that takes for Google to update that really varies. It varies depending upon crawl frequency, how big your site is, the authority of your site, bigger sites get a lot more traffic are crawled more often so they probably update a lot quicker as opposed to smaller sites but I always flush the error messages and the reason I do that is so that once you’ve completed the process, you’ve done the change over, you set your 301’s, you’ve tested, log into Google Webmaster tools, flush it, that way once you’ve flushed it you know that you’re no longer potentially looking at historical data because that can throw you out. If you log in, in two weeks and go, oh no, what are all of these error messages here? They could be from a month ago. So it’s always best to go, okay, let’s wipe the slate clean and let’s see what we’re working with now.

Byron: All right and what are some of the other areas that we can look at with Webmaster tools and our new site, is there anything that we need to do in that – from that angle?

John: It’s probably a lot. Overall you just want to be monitoring Webmaster tools for, you know, incorrectly set 301’s, timeouts, pages not found, crawl errors. I’m pretty fussy when I do this sort of work and I tend to go through my spreadsheet and check URL’s manually. Of course if you’ve got 100,000 URL’s you wouldn’t do that but, you know my advice is to just check and double check and triple check everything, you know, make sure that your site is loading, make sure that it’s loading. Page speed is good, make sure that you’re not being redirected to a page that is incorrect. Make sure that you update any links on your site that may be incorrect, you know, send some dummy inquires using a contact form. Make sure people can contact you, do a test purchase, make sure that everything’s working. I don’t know, outside of that what can you suggest Byron within Webmaster tools?

Byron: I was just thinking in terms of submitting the new site map obviously and making sure that… Or you might have. That’s not true. Yeah, possibly, yeah. But obviously John’s mentioned it already, so, yeah, brand new site; submit your site map and then monitor and make it part of your daily routine for a while and just keep checking back on it.

John: Yeah.

Byron: I’m always paranoid about the contact forms. I think – I always feel like contacting myself more times than not just so it’s still working. Hopefully, you know, every time a content updates or something like that I’ve got to test it. I just got to trust it on its own.

John: Oh, look at my conversion rates, they’re through the roof but 60% of your inquiries have been you testing your form.

Byron: It’s all been me. Oh, dear, yeah, you’ve got to make sure sales and inquiry’s, you can’t take any second chances with those.

John: Just make sure that your site is not only – you know, your redirects are in place but make sure your site is actually working. Another way that might be worth the mention is just going to Google, typing in site: putting in your domain and just clicking on a few of the most important links. Again, if you’ve got a site that’s quarter of a million pages, go through the pages that are listed in Google and click on some of the most important ones and make sure that they’re redirecting correctly.

But, you know, the most important part of this process is the planning and preparation especially for bigger sites. You know, if you’ve got a ten-page site about breeding puppies, you know, you’re not going to be laying awake at night wondering if you’re going to lose your Google rankings but if it’s an ecommerce store that’s doing a quarter of a million dollars a month well then planning and preparation is super important.

And I think a lot of business owners that I speak to, you know, the 301 redirects are something that’s completely new to them. So it’s not something that gets discussed that regularly, you know, you talk about building new Web sites a lot of business are familiar with that but the 301 redirect is something that really hasn’t been considered a lot in the past so it’s good to bring it to the attention and get people aware of it.

Something that business owners always ask, even though they’re not aware of setting 301’s, I mean, that’s – we’re going down geek street there so it’s not for them really to know but most business owners are smart enough to ask, if we update the Web site will we slow our rankings – will we keep our rankings?

So most business owners, you know, are aware of that but unfortunately, you know, I’ve worked with a lot of business owners that have just been given, you know, terrible help and advice and just, you know, you need to fix the Web site. We can build you a beautiful looking Web site, they’ll just pull the old site, upload the new site and, as I said before, they loose all of their rankings, their traffic drops, they’ve got a nice looking site that’s just sitting there gathering dust.

Byron: And just to finish up John, I mean, in terms of – you know you’ve launched your new Web site and you’ve implemented all of the 301 redirects, you’ve tested, you’ve monitored, it’s all looking good, how frequently do you still see movement based on a new Web site, is that something that’s common?

John: That’s a good question actually. With most, if not all of the 301 – or site moves that I’ve done whether it’s been to a new host or site upgrades and don’t forgot when I say move to a new host I’m talking about moving to a new host as well as changing the Web site and it’s a question that a lot of business owners ask like what will happen? Will I lose my rankings? Will I keep them?

Usually it gets a bit wobbly, okay, especially during the re-indexation of your site once Google starts picking up the 301’s and understanding that your site has changed.

This isn’t something that happens within a matter of minutes, okay, depending upon the size of your site it might take anywhere from two days up to, you know, I think the longest one that I’ve seen has been about two weeks because Google won’t come in and crawl your entire site especially for bigger sites. It might crawl a portion and then come back and then it takes chunks.

So, I always say to business owners I don’t know – I’ll be doing my best to ensure that we preserve your rankings but I can’t guarantee you that you’re going to go up or you’re not going to go down.

Byron: Yep.

John: It’s – there’s really no way of knowing because don’t forget, once you go about changing the site, I mean, it’s likely that you’ll be changing metadata information and perhaps even content on the page so, you know, it’s anyone’s guess as to which way it goes. Most of the sites that I’ve worked on have just remained pretty much constant. I’ve seen improvements, I’ve seen some pages that might drop off a page. So it really varies.

Byron: Yep. Yeah, and again it depends on how much of that structure’s changed if you’ve gone from a very old 1990 style Web site structure to a modern WordPress style structure just doing that alone might have boost in your rankings as well so there’s a whole range of factors that really come in when you’re changing a site so significantly.

John: Yeah, I mean, like I said at the beginning of this Podcast you should be making changes in order to make improvements. You know, making your site more search engine friendly optimizing for, you know, keywords, increasing – working towards increasing your conversion rates, I see a lot of business owners that go about, unfortunately, just updating their Web site because they just want to change the look and feel.

You know, that’s only a small part of it. You should be doing that yes, but, you know, as part of the big picture it should be let’s make our site look better but let’s make this thing perform so that we get five inquiries a day or, you know, a lot more inquiries per month.

Byron: All right John, well that’s all we’ve got time for this week.

John: You’re still with me Byron? You still there?

Byron: I’m still here, I’m still here, still rocking and rolling.

John: You know, it’s not the sexiest topic to talk about.

Byron: I think it’s a good one. I’m excited by it, you’ve inspired me. I’ve got a few Web site redesigns coming up so all things that are coming my way in the next couple of weeks as well so it’s good to refresh it.

John: I’m a big fan of the spreadsheet method because I can get it all out in front of me and I know exactly what I’m looking at so that when I do the change over I can – I don’t even have to think. Let’s face it, who wants to think, I just want to reference the spreadsheet, bang it out and make sure that it works.

Byron: I think it’s a good feeling if you’re got a nice shiny new Web site, you’ve got the structure right, it feels and looks good and you know, you’re going through Google, you’re checking your links and they’re all linking through to your new Web site, I mean, when you’ve got that all in place it just feels really good going, yep, okay, I’ve got a solution here, we’ve really done a great job and, you know, we can hopefully sit back and reap the reward.

John: Right, you feel warm and fuzzy as part of that process and…

Byron: Exactly.

John: If you’re going through – if you’re going to be doing something like this, if for business owners if they’re going to be going through this process this is not something that you should be doing, you know, once every few months, this should be something that should be put into place that should do you for a good five to seven maybe even ten years so long as it’s done properly.

Byron: Yep.

John: Because you know, if you get yourself working there shouldn’t be any need for you to start breaking anything. What’s the saying, don’t fix what’s not broken?

Byron: Yeah, exactly.

John: But, yeah, that’s probably it. Yeah, we’re over our 25 or 30 minute…

Byron: Well over, yeah. All right John, well thank you for your time again.

John: Do you want…

Byron: Got to get more Red Bull into me this week, it’s been a long week actually. Not as many hours sleep as I normally get so…

John: All good dude.

Byron: Exactly. All right John, well thank you very much. I’ll speak to you…

John: I’ll see you next Wednesday.

Byron: …next Podcast.

John: All right man, see ya. Bye.

Byron: Thanks mate, see you later. Bye.

The post Ep13 – How to Keep Your Rankings In Google When Updating Your Website appeared first on SEO Point.