I'm looking to change the template/theme for my site as it's getting a bit old and I can feel I could improve it to the visitors. I'm wondering whether I should expect any SERP decrease as a result as the position of page items will be changed as well. Ultimately, the question is; does Google like template changes and not penalise sites for it?
Certainly Google will not penalize your site because you changed the template or design of the site. We also had applied new design to our site for home page and inner pages. ranking was affected for couple of weeks but it recovered. But we had not changed the look of site in one glance. 1st we changed the home page later the inner pages were changed in 3-4 steps. and had taken following care we are not changing the URL names (only page look and feel was changed) we are keeping the Title tag and meta tags unchanged. we are not moving the Google analytics and webmasters code.. we also had taken care that new design was user and search engine friendly like use of CSS instead of JS. still we have some JS in site but from external JS files. The inner pages were linked from home page and other pages in better manner.
Ah, thanks for the response. Well, my main site uses wordpress so that would mean a simple wordpress template change that would affect the whole site unfortunately. I will also be adding new widgets/ hardcoded HTML to my page but I think it will be better to allow at least 2-3 months before changing the template and doing so, right?
Funny that I should see this thread as I redesigned my site around 6 days ago – same URLs, different layout, cats added to a sidebar menu, that’s all – and I’ve seen a marked change in traffic (as a result earnings down by a shocking 40%!!). It’ll recover and I am still ranking very well in most instances, but a marked downturn non-the-less. Thankfully this new look will be it now for some years as it’s very tightly coded, clean and easy to adapt but, whilst feedback from readers has been extremely positive, Google have obviously decided to slap my wrists regardless. I’ll be tightening my belt for a while by the looks of it.
Always Remember Search Engines are Visually (Template,stylesheet) Blind! They can only see the text in the pages!
So you're saying that changing the wordpress template should not affect how the SE sees the page? Because the basic structure will be maintained in the end.
it will have some short term impact on traffic from google, but for long term, if your template is ok, no html error or some bad link inside, everything will back
Try to focus on what is the best for your visitors and the ranking will follow. Create sites for visitors not for the search engines. PERIOD
excatly.. dont worry and go ahead...change your template.. i change them regularly...if they were to kick me out...i might have been dead by now
I wonder.. if I were to change only the front page and leave the rest of the pages the same, would that be good/bad/better/worse?