Site Redesign Can Ruin Your Day

Or a much longer period of time …

I have a client who has enjoyed years of very good listings. Almost every single keyword imaginable that would be relevant to their site ranked well. They had tons of listings, and they had good traffic and conversions.

Somewhere on the Corporate level a decision was made to redesign the website. Further they decided it was too “wordy” and reduced the amount of content on each page. To take it a step further, they made an entirely new site, removing all of the existing pages and replacing them with brand new pages with brand new filenames. All of the pages now on the site are brand new.

I think you can figure out what has happened … they have tanked, all the way down to zero listings … and so I have been told … zero leads now coming from the site. They are not happy. I can see why.

I was not contacted about this redesign, beyond being informed there would be some changes taking place. After they had launched the new site they informed me of the new design. They are quite happy with the site and love the new design and streamlined nature of all the very short pages.

This is all good but … I will not get this site listed again, with the number of pages we had, for a while. There is no button or switch to push, there is no magic. We had lots of good listings, but the pages have been removed from the site.

Moral of this story: If you have a page that lists well … remember that if you remove it, it won’t list at all.

I know this should be common sense … but then again … common sense isn’t common.