Changing your site’s structure and design

Changing URLs is not the same as creating pages at new addresses. Yandex states the failure directly: create a new page and the robot indexes both, and they appear in results as two separate pages.

Changing the structure — the procedure

• 301 redirect from old to new. The robot indexes the target and removes the old page. Chains are permitted, and the final destination is what gets indexed.
• Verify the new URL returns 200 OK with content, using the server response check, and that important pages are not blocked in robots.txt.
• For pages that no longer exist: if the topic is unchanged and a comparable page exists, redirect to the relevant section. If the structure and content genuinely changed, the old pages must return 404 so they are removed after re-crawling. Blocking them in robots.txt speeds removal.
• Submit for reindexing — new pages appear within two weeks, and old pages carrying redirects can also be submitted so the robot notices the redirect faster. That second trick is rarely used and shortens the transition materially.
• Update the sitemap and resubmit or upload a new one.
• Update the navigation menu, and use the External links report to find third-party sites still pointing at old URLs — then ask them to update.

Changing the design without changing URLs

A redesign has its own failure modes, all of them silent:

• Content generated by JavaScript is not indexed. What should rank must be present in the HTML returned immediately on request.
• Check that the new templates do not carry a robots noindex meta tag, or a rel="canonical" pointing at another page — a canonical aimed at the home page or the catalogue root is a standard template default and it removes every new page from search.
• Check that every opening noindex element is closed.
• Check that title and the meta tags are correctly populated on the new templates.

The pattern

Structural changes fail loudly; redesigns fail quietly. A redesign that keeps every URL can still remove a site from search through one inherited canonical tag, and nothing about the site looks wrong.