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Can Going Responsive Hurt Your Rankings?

We all know that Google and Bing much prefer a responsive design over many others, especially when it comes to Search Engine Optimisation. However, this by no means, means that you should just jump into the design without any pre-meditated thought.

Switching from a normal design to a responsive design needs some thought and careful consideration. After you have decided that responsive is the way to go for you and your company, you will need to run through all of your SEO checkpoints, just like you would if you were launching a brand new website.

When it comes to launching you site in a responsive design there are some basic principles that you will need to run through, this is assuming that you modify all of your websites HTML structure in order to make the change). You will need to make sure of the following, if they are all possible of course:

The URLs in place on your site remain the same, if not however, you will need to make sure that proper redirects are in place
All page titles on your site need to remain identical
all of the content that is in place on you website needs to stay the same
The navigation which is in use on your site, such as the internal links, needs to stay pretty much the same
All of the images and graphics which are in place on the page need to stay identical
All meta data in place need to stay identical
All basic SEO principles for a redesign have been run over to ensure everything is working correctly

When launching the new responsive design you want to ensure that you do not change too much other than the HTML and design, as these will need to be changed. You will need the content, graphics, URLs, navigation and everything else to be as similar as possible to what it was before.

If all of this is carried out, it is very unlikely that you will see any change at all when it comes to rankings or indexation by search engines. Just like with any major design revamp, you will need to ensure that you test, test and test again, just to ensure that no mistakes have been made as well as making sure nothing has been forgotten.

After your site has been launched, you will need to keep an eye out for any 404’s, errors and your sites analytics to make sure that nothing has been missed or carried out incorrectly. If you catch these mistakes fast, if any are made, you should be able to fix them fast and all your rankings should experience no changes at all.