Rankings drops occur after a redesign predominantly because of a drastic change to the site architecture. Crawlers come in expecting your old site and get confused because what they were expecting isn't there. When you consider a strategy for protecting your rankings post-redesign, think about preserving the integrity of the information that's already indexed. That will help the crawlers find what they're looking for more easily.
If the original site is simply going to be migrated over to the new template with all the current pages left intact, the 301 won't be necessary. However, if any resources or pages are being moved or deleted, those pages should redirect to that page or image's current location. So, if all of the URLs are going to be different - say, a move from numeric product ids to keyword-based ones - then the old addresses should 301 to the new versions.
The key is simply performing as much preservation as possible and making corrections for the instances where you can't.
__________________
Jeff Stolarcyk
Solid Cactus - Search Engine Optimization Specialist
|