At GO Media, we are often asked to do complete rebrands and a refresh of an old, outdated website. Many clients ask us how long it will take for Google to crawl, index and rank the new page. Is it possible that the new website will rank even higher now that it is a modern and better looking website?
Before assuming that any change to a website will be seen in a positive light in the eyes of the Google Algorithm, we must understand the ranking factors that matter the most. The most important ranking factors in Google search are external links pointing to a homepage or specific page and the content on that page. If the content is unique, valuable and useful to the searcher, Google places a higher value on the content. If the content is simply copied and pasted from another website or is stale content that is years old, Google places a lower value on the content.
If your business goes through a website refresh and none of the content is changed, updated or improved, there likely will not be a huge change in the search rankings. If the Google Spiders crawl a new website, they expect to crawl new content as well. Let’s say that you updated the content or had professional copywriters or staff members update the content on the website, will this make it rank higher as soon as it is crawl and indexed? Not necessarily.
External links will always be the most important part of the Google Algorithm. If a business owner refreshes the website, updates the content and is hoping for the best, they may be confused to find out that their new website does not rank that much better than the old website. Why is that the case? Once again, Google’s algorithms almost expect there to be new links pointing to the website because it was recently refreshed or rebuilt. With zero (0) new links pointing at the brand new site, it may cause the site to actually drop.
The way a website improves drastically in the rankings is when the site is refreshed and updated, there is brand new content on all the pages and new external links are pointing to multiple pages within the website. This is telling Google that the site should rank higher. If a website refresh or rebuild is completed by GO Media, we make certain that the Google spiders crawl the website as soon as it goes live. We cannot control how fast the site is indexed and ranked, but we take every step to make that happen as quickly as possible. If you have a brand new website that is not showing up in search and the old website is still cached after one (1) month, it is time to contact GO Media and allow us to help.