iGB Affiliate 55 Feb/Mar | Page 33

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 29