TRAFFIC
Figure 3: A multilingual website’s URI’s average response time in
seconds before redesign, during staging and post-redesign.
Before redesign
Staging environment
After redesign
Figure 4: URL depth before and after a successful redesign
(as displayed in ScreamingFrog)
double check it once the new site is live on
the server that will host it permanently. As
a matter of fact, the server hosting the site
and its actual “live” load also affect a site’s
performance. Luckily though, production
servers are typically better performing than
staging environments (see Figure 3).
4. Benchmark your old and new
design’s depth and internal linking
structure
When crawling websites, search engines
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iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016
need to carefully manage their resources
in terms of energy and computational
effort. Therefore, they like information
to be made easily accessible to them, and
may decide to stop crawling a site when
they think they already dedicated enough
energy to such task.
As a consequence, sites should make
all their most important content reachable
from the home page in the lowest possible
amount of clicks. This normally translates
to a flatter, “horizontal” site structure being
preferable to a deep, “vertical” one. Also,
pages that are more heavily linked within
the site will acquire more “SEO value” than
others, and possibly rank more easily.
Considering the above, a redesign offers a
good chance for lowering a site’s depth and
making its pages easier to crawl, possibly
also improving its internal linking structure
in favour of key pages (see section 1). Above
all though, a new design should definitely
not make internal pages harder for search
engines to reach.
To make sure you did not commit
any mistake in redesigning your site’s
architecture, you can use ScreamingFrog
to perform a massive analysis to your new
design, to verify whether “deep” pages are
harder or easier for search engine spiders to
reach (see Figure 4).
Apart from the new design’s depth,
another element that is good to check during
a redesign is link distribution. Essentially,
while a depth analysis tells you how far
from the homepage most of your site’s pages
are in terms of links, a link distribution
analysis will give you an overview of how
internal links are distributed across pages. In
other words, it will show you how the “link
equity” of your site is distributed.
Conducting this kind of analysis needs
a bit more manual effort than the previous
one, but is still rather simple. First of all,
you will need to set a significant sample of
pages to base your analysis on (e.g. the first
1,000 pages of your site, in crawling order).
Then, you will need to crawl them in their
old and new version with ScreamingFrog,
exporting the reports on internal links
per URI. Finally, you should work on the
reports in Excel, sorting them in decreasing
order and creating a comparative graph,
possibly comparing them both in absolute
and proportional terms (note that due to the
typically high difference in link distribution
across pages, using a logarithmic scale is
often necessary).
This kind of analysis can help you
highlight whether your website’s new
design increases or decreases the gap