: Keeping old design up for SEO I am almost ready to publish a new website design for my website. It contains some of the same content, but a lot is worded differently. My plan is simply to

@Martha676

If you are completely changing the structure, theme of your website, my advice is:

Do not make all the changes together.

Googlebot and users do not like websites that are completely changed. For example you might have a blog and 100 direct readers. Your readers know the structure of your website, they know that on the right top there are the popular posts, at the home page there are some interesting widgets etc, they can easily navigate through your website.

If you completely change the website, some of them will leave. Also Googlebot and specially if you are using Adsense, will start to re-validate your website, and you possibly see that your rankings and earnings are going down, and you will need weeks or months to reach your old earnings.

To sum up:

Do not have 2 versions of the website (duplicated links) for any reason (as Martijn also said) this will destroy your SEO, and make the changes one at a time.
Stay with the change for some days and continue with the next change, so Googlebot and your readers are get used to these changes.

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@Bryan171

I agree with Martijn.

You say and inconspicuous link for web crawlers. That sounds like a good idea but let's say that when a user searches Google your old content is more relevant than the new for whatever reason. Then the user will be clicking on a link that takes them to the old design with old information. If this is acceptable to you then I say give it a shot.

Martijn also mentioned that Google follows the users. This is why Google built Chrome a browser for all types of devices and why they have Android phones. They literally follow users so if users never browse to the old site then Google might not give too much weight to those pages. Again, give it a shot and then report your findings if they are good.

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@Courtney195

If your main content is about the same, just make the switch. Don't give your users two versions of your website. Those are your main concern, Google will follow the users.

Moving your old site to a new directory makes even less sense: you have a PR per page, or actually per URL. If you change /some-page to /backup/some-page, you will lose that the PR and have the backup indexed again. Which you don't want, you want your new site to take over.

Short answer: Just make the switch. Just make sure all your URLs are preserved, and try to use as many 301-header as you can where needed.

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