A site frozen in 1998
Gilles Ciment is a theorist of animated film and comics, and a former director general of the Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l'image. For almost thirty years, his personal website has gathered his reviews, interviews and essays: a substantial online library, which notably published some of the very first French-language interviews with Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki. More than 400,000 visits over its entire lifetime.
The site had existed since 1998 on gciment.free.fr, originally hosted by Free as part of the free internet access offer of the time. Gilles Ciment had designed it and kept it going himself, with whatever means were at hand: a few occasional redesigns in the 2000s, but a structure and code that had barely changed since. HTML tables, system fonts, a rigid layout: despite this, and despite twenty-five years of history and exclusive content, the site was only capturing around 80 to 90 organic visits a month.
A complete redesign, from content to infrastructure
The goal was not to start the content over: 92 pages built up over almost thirty years represented a real editorial heritage to preserve in full, and some thirty new pages had to be added. The project also involved a domain change (from gciment.free.fr to gillesciment.com): a delicate operation which, poorly prepared, can wipe out in one go the SEO authority built up over twenty-five years. Four objectives guided the project:
- Migrate all existing pages to a modern, responsive and readable structure.
- Change domains without losing the SEO authority built up since 1998.
- Give Gilles Ciment the means to keep publishing on his own, without relying on me for each new article.
- Put the site back on an SEO growth path, after years without real optimization.
Design, development & technical SEO
I built the new site with React and Vite, and I also handled the entire visual redesign, from the visual identity to the layout of each type of content (home page, film pages, interviews, CV...). So that Gilles Ciment stays autonomous, I built a custom editor that lets him create and edit his pages without touching the code.
In parallel, I carried out technical SEO optimization: URL structure, semantic markup, internal linking between the film pages, loading performance, indexing. Since the site had never been built with SEO in mind, much of this work consisted of laying foundations that had been missing since 1998. The migration from gciment.free.fr to gillesciment.com was handled carefully: 301 redirects from each old URL to its equivalent on the new domain, then reindexing, to preserve the authority built up over twenty-five years rather than starting from scratch.
Catalog of animated films
CV & biography
Visibility takes off
The ranking tracking below covers the new domain, gillesciment.com: it therefore shows nothing before the launch. Once the site was published and the technical optimization deployed, indexing started and rankings climbed quickly, with a clear acceleration in early June.
Ranking keywords by position range, stacked, from February to July 2026.
Organic traffic follows a similar path: zero during the switchover and reindexing, it overtook the level of the old domain as early as June, and has now settled about 50% above the historical average of gciment.free.fr.
Estimated monthly organic traffic, from February to July 2026.