SEO Step By Step Guide– 79.Adding New Programming Modules without affecting your search engine ranking

In this post, let us discuss how adding new programming modules can affect our website’s search engine ranking. There are number of situations in a website’s lifecycle whereby we may have to add new programming modules. For instance, you may be having a simple website without any shopping cart and you might decide to upgrade your website to promote online shopping. Or, you may decide to add a new content management system to your website that will allow you to add new pages or edit the current pages etc.

In all the above situations, your website may be undergoing changes at a number of levels. Your website’s basic architecture would be changing, the content of your website will be changing, the URL structure of the new pages will change and even the existing pages may have a different URL if they are edited via the new CMS, your website’s navigation too will change. On the whole, it affects your website in a very serious level. With all these changes, you can expect changes in your website’s ranking in the subsequent update. To avoid any negative effects, you must take necessary precautions.

If you expect the URLs of the existing pages to change (we are not talking about the domain name change here, just the inner pages), then you need to make sure to use 301 redirects for your pages so that it will tell the search engines that your pages are moved permanently. This will also help you retain your page’s ranking. Remember not to do any content change for the old pages at this moment if you can help. If you fail to implement 301 redirects then your website will have too many ‘Page not found’ errors logged. This will also frustrate the users until your new pages are indexed for the same keywords. Many webmasters make the mistake of using temporary redirects instead of permanent redirects. This will not transfer your web page’s ranking to the new page. It would take a long time before your pages get indexed and regained the original search engine ranking.

When you did not have a CMS in place, you would have ensured that your URLs are search engine friendly. When you implement a CMS in your site, ensuring your web pages have search engine friendly URLs is a difficult tasks. There are many latest CMS tools available in the market that are capable of generating search engine friendly URLs. You will be able to save great deal of SEO efforts by getting a search engine friendly CMS. If not, your revamped website will not be fully crawled and your new pages will have poor search engine ranking. If you take into consideration the whole process, you can see that you just need to take few simple precautions to alleviate SEO related damage to your website.

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