[BNM] SEO / google advice

[Paul Silver]

On Tue, 2 Oct 2007 10:48:45 +0100, "AndrewGill73 at gmail.com"
<andrewgill73 at gmail.com> said:
> A mate has been running a successful b2c website for just over a year.
> He's
> always suffered from a low Google ranking and just relied on other search
> engines such as Yahoo.

If it was a new site on a new domain a year ago, it's probably been in
the 'Google Sandbox' - a nickname for a set of filters which
artificially downgrade a new site in the rankings for ~9-12 months. When
you come out of this, you often see a load more traffic from Google if
your SEO was pretty solid.

 
> He's spent the past 2 months employing a SEO Agency to re-design his
> website
> to be more SEO friendly - it's finished now but hasn't been launched
> yet...
> 
> In the last week after a long time coming he suddenly moved to position 1
> for some keywords on google.co.uk.
> 
> He's concerned that if he launches his new website he may adversely
> effect
> his new natural listing. Is there a risk this could happen? Does anyone
> have experience of anything similar?

As long as they are still doing the copy correctly (or better than the
original) and any internal pages linked to either have the same address
or redirects set up, you should be OK.

You can find out what pages are linked to by registering the site in
Google Webmaster Tools - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ - and
in the Links section it has a list of pages which are linked to from
other sites (if any.) If those pages don't exist in the new site, set up
a 301 permanent redirect from the old address to the most relevant new
page.

Other than that - the only time I've seen this go badly is when someone
horribly over-filled their home page with a term they wanted to rank
for, and got themselves penalised for that - but if your new copy is OK
that shouldn't be a problem.

HTH

Paul
-- 
  Paul Silver
  Development work: http://www.paulsilver.co.uk
  Search engine promotion work: http://webpositioningcentre.co.uk
  Home: http://www.tenpastmidnight.com