Search Engine Optimization

The high cost of website redesign | From handbuilt to Drupal

I have been in the process of switching my custom websites to Drupal websites. It has been an interesting experience, and frustrating and wonderful in so many ways.

Hits to search engine optimization

For many of my websites I had a steady stream of search engine hits per day. This dropped significantly for my websites after I made the switch from my custom websites to the Drupal websites. I am signed up for both Google Webmaster and Google Analytics (both of which I highly recommend). I logged into these sites and began dissecting what the problems could be.

The sites took too long to load

For many of my sites, they were just too slow. Many people told me that my hosting was the problem, that I needed a dedicated server. I would have to say this is an easy cope out, and not at all what the problem was. Hosting is the easiest thing to blame, but switching hosting providers is a big pain and not something I do lightly. I did however spend at a few hours of research to determine it was not my hosting provider that was causing the problems.

I ran a few site speed tests, and quickly realized some problems on my website. One website had large rotating banners, and the images were huge. I scaled them down a bit, and the quality difference in the images was barely noticeable. This one change changed my speed from 10 seconds to 3 seconds.

I thought about condensing my javaScript and CSS files, but at 3 seconds I was no longer worried about my speed. Also, I wanted to have a readable set of my files in case I lost my backups on my computer and wanted to change the code. I do plan to minimize my code someday, but today it is just not worth the trouble.

My Google Maps Took Too Long to Load

In another website I had a large Google map that took forever to load. I imagine it just has too many data points (I have smaller Google maps on other websites, and I only had this problem on one website). I loved the map, but I could not have the super slow load times. It was killing my site. I ended up moving the map to its own tab in the menu. It is a tad chunkier for user experience than I would like, but I am confident in the choice. The Google maps are also not user friendly for my lovely mobile visitors, so moving the map to its own tab increased their usability of the site. So I made the site faster for all users, and friendlier for mobile users.

Conclusion

Once I made these changes, traffic started to pick back up for my websites. It is still not what it used to be. I know that there are a lot of links to my site to specific pages that no longer exist. For future websites, I will make a better plan to keep pages with the same path. It always amazes me how the internet loves change, and seems so slow to archive (I’m looking at you search engines) the new changes.

I help your website get found on the internet.

SEO is a strange discipline, as it is highly secretive constantly changing. I have a dozen test websites, and hundreds of articles to easily track any changes and to see what works and what does not.

Google can, and does, blacklist websites

Google can and often does blacklist websites. If Google feels your website is spam, or of no use, they will remove your from their index entirely.

If this happens to you, it can effectively take your website off of the internet. Google still has the largest search engine market share, and if they delist you other search engines probably will too.

How can you tell if you've been blacklisted? You need to track your web visitors. If you see any drastic changes to your traffic, you may be blacklisted. And yes, you can ask Google to let you back in.