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Looking to update your website in the New Year?

Wondering which factors to pick to make changes on the website?

Well, this article will bring 6 factors to consider before making major changes to your website.

1) If there are broken internal links

Broken links can harm your site architecture. This kind of link shows something really wrong with the website change.

Checking these links is a diagnostic test. It may not tell you what goes wrong with your web page, but surely give you an idea about there is something wrong with your website.

broken link

2) If there are 404 Page Not Found Responses

In general, 404 errors or response codes are called error codes, but they’re not. They are server responses and these 404 responses are normal, but an error is not normal or welcome at all.

Although, if you crawl a site and find 404 response codes, this would tell you something has gone wrong with that page.

404

3) Check the proper site architecture

Site architecture or taxonomy or how the web pages are organized, all are the same and contribute to the configuration of a web page. The best way is to have a logical category page structure, with sub-categories, if needed.

There are two considerations:
  • Maintain existing site structure to avoid losing rankings.
  • Make changes to a poor site architecture in order to improve rankings.

Maintain Site Architecture

To keep your good rankings going, maintain existing site architecture. This means maintaining the same URLs and categories.

If you want to merge web pages, pick the most popular URL and redirect the old ones to the new URL.

It’s imperative to note that any 301 redirects are done from pages where content closely matches to each other. Failing to properly match the redirected content would take to undesired ranking changes.

Update the Site Architecture

If you are going to update your website because of its poor ranking performance, reviewing the site architecture can be a good idea. If the previous version is not accurately organized, the new taxonomy suggestion may work for it.

Content when properly organized can have a chance of ranking better. When content is neatly organized within categories, they are all interlinked and give meaningful context to each other.

4) Crawl the site using the original site map

Numbers of crawlers can crawl a site with the help of a list of URLs, including an XML site map. You can find various issues in the new website with the help of the original site map crawling.

5) Discover thin pages

Integrating a new CMS or updating a website may not offer you desired results as they create thin pages. Check out your web pages using the best SEO audit tool and search any page is lacking a good amount of content.

Thin content

6) Identify Duplicate Content

Google looks for duplicate content, but it’s not a big deal. Google specifies the issue by selecting a single page to rank and directing all the link signals from the duplicates to that chosen page.

This process can be done by using canonicals to provide search engines a clue of which page is the main content page.

Duplicate Content

Conclusion

If you want your website to excel, keep adding some changes at the regular interval. This helps Google know that you have updated as the new trends.

Here are 6 factors that you should consider before making any update to your site.

DSIM Team
DSIM Blog is created to help you to know all aspects of Digital Marketing ranging from basics of Digital Marketing to Advance Level Topics, Read our posts and feel free to reach our team for any queries.

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