I have a new site design which I want to launch for the New Year. Would this have an effect on my PR and rankings? The actual text content and pics. are still the same but the layout is different My site at the moment is html and the new design is php. I have done this new design because I intend to start selling ad space, rotating banner ad's as well as text links etc. My site is PR4, I get an average of 2000 uniques a day.I have 6 keywords at number 1 with google, and another 7 keywords placed in thr top 5. All 12 keywords are ranked at number 1 with google.co.uk. Keywords are all in top 10 with other major search engines. I need to improve the site, I think it gives my clients a good impression if they see that we are trying to be more user friendly but I don't want to affect my rankings. Any experts out there with advice.
Yes, your new design CAN affect to the worse, or to the best. These tips are common here in the forum: - Try to use as much CSS possible - Try to use menus with text, not images - Use images as few as possible in the header - Try to place the content the more in the top possible of the html code
If your site have strong backlinks, good PR, it wont harm your site. Even my site jump from #5 to #2. After re-design, make my site fast load with CSS and less tables.
Thanks guys, yes pogung I am also looking for faster loading. I don't use image menus and try and keep all my content in the upper regions. I have been pretty successfull so far, or lucky which I suppose has a lot to do with it. But my rankings are good and I am in a very competitive market, so my keywords are not so rare or unusual. I just keep getting the jitters when I think I could lose a lot of hard work. I would assume that keeping the original site intact, if anything did happen I should be able to revert back to the original and hopefully get back to where I was. Thanks everyone for the input and advice.
PR is related with backlinks, and if your backlinks don't change, the design will not change your PR. And if you don't change the texts in your pages, and these texts under php still can be read by SEs, it will aslo not affect your rankings in google. But for msn and yahoo, I'm not sure, but heard that these 2 are more focused on the design than google.
As long as you make sure all the old pages are 301 redirected to the new pages you should be fine. You may want to just keep the pages on the same url and use htaccess to make the html pages parse like php pages.