TRAFFIC
Figure 5: Internal link distribution before and after a redesign
Figure 6: Effects of a good redesign in Google Search Console
between your site’s top pages and the rest
of it, and in how many tiers your site is
split in terms of link equity.
Taking the analysis in Figure 5 as an
example, we can see how in this case our
website’s new design generally increases the
amount of links pointing to each page. More
significantly, it seems to attribute much
more “link equity” to the site’s top 40 pages,
while before only the site’s top 10 pages
were clearly given more importance in the
internal linking hierarchy.
If these changes reflect the actual
importance and SEO potential of the site’s
pages, then this is to be considered as a
positive result; in this example, the increase in
link equity towards the top 40 pages was due
to the presence of a “top pages” menu in the
site’s new design, with the specific purpose of
strengthening its most important pages.
5. Double check your new design
for internal content duplication
Changing a site’s de sign and template
basically means changing the way in which
its pages are “assembled” starting from
numeric, graphic and textual building
blocks. This can result in the same elements
being used in different ways across multiple
pages. If the way in which data and content
is used across different pages is not carefully
monitored, the site may end up with several
pages having almost identical content
(duplicate content) or with pages in which
duplicated boilerplate elements (menus,
headings, footers, etc.) take more space than
meaningful content.
Both these situations can damage the site,
confusing the search engines about what
pages should be ranked for a specific topic
and generally lowering the site’s perceived
quality, especially following Google’s
implementation of its Panda algorithm8.
In order to avoid accidentally lowering
your site’s perceived quality, it is important
to ensure your new design is not excessively
re-using and internally duplicating content. A
tool which can help you to check your website
for this kind of risks is Siteliner9, which can
8
9
https://moz.com/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content
http://www.siteliner.com/
iGB Affiliate Issue 55 FEB/MAR 2016
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