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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 28 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