Rebuild the site or Rewrite your content?

Rebuilding a website is a necessary evil; Code goes out of date, fashion goes out of date.

Much of web fashion is based on the principles of Conversion Rate Optimisation, the placement of elements where the user expects it. This design aspect influences ranking a little bit as Google, Bing and Yahoo are all concerned with providing users with the best experience of the internet.

So periodically a website should be redesigned. But is it really a redesign that should be absorbing all of your energies in your website or should you start thinking about a re-write of the content? Which will make a bigger difference to your SEO? 

Re-Writing Content for SEO

Content re-writing is a serious undertaking. The average corporate website, when checked in Google, has around 1000 pages. Older Corporate websites can have ten times that number. But are they all required and are they all helping your website?

Is having lots of pages in my site a good thing?

Best practice dictates that lots of pages is a Good Thing, though only if they are all unique. So surely having thousands of pages is great? Well not necessarily. Google Assesses your website as an entity, not just the individual pages, so if your glut of content has numerous crossover points then they could actually be damaging your ranking for that subject.

While we’re on the subject of subjects, let’s take a good hard look and the content structure of the site. Each page should be targeted at a single search phrase, right? Well yes, but when you get down to it, is anyone searching for that phrase? Check the search volumes on some of these terms and you start to feel like the vast majority of your web pages aren’t about anything people want to read. You may produce an Inflatable Easy Chair for Indoor or Pool use with Cupholders ™ and have ten pages dedicated to why your product is perfect for outdoor use, or for guests, or for parties etc, but how many of your customers get beyond searching “Pool Chair” or “Inflatable Chair”? So those ten pages might just be dead weight, diffusing your subject matter and not effectively reinforcing your target phrases. So consider shopping them out.

But surely that gives me a massive risk of dropping my rankings?

Yes. No sugar coating now: making such a drastic change to your website puts your SEO campaign at risk and actually if there were ways to mitigate it, then you aren’t making a big enough change. But as Del boy used to say: “He who dares Rodders, He who dares”.

Editing and amalgamating 5000 pages is going to take a long time but if it pares your message down and makes the site more readable and easier to navigate, there is a strong chance that Google will favour it over competitors’ websites who are still wallowing with massive bloated sites that are impossible to navigate.

The important thing is to ensure that if links exist around the web to pages that you are removing, a suitable redirect should be used to tell Google that the content has merely been moved rather than completely destroyed.

If the risk factor is still too high, then keep a backup of the site as it was, with its huge glut of pages, if your rankings drop away after slimming down, then simply restore the site to its former corpulence and they should come back up.