Changing layout without affecting SEO

Hi

How much of the design/layout of a page must be changed to make that page lose its page rank and good positions in google listings?

I have a personal website with PR3 and some internal pages with PR1 or PR2, with good listings on google (overall), but i want to change the layout of the website. Will add more content to each page, but will not remove the current content. Also, meta information, title etc will remain the same. Im just changing layout, images and adding some content.

Any one have experience with that?

 

Hi there,

In my personal experience, my site will have a traffic drop when I get a massive site redesign. But if you do all with CSS modification and not touching the HTML structures, There will be no obvious effect at all.

I've a couple site new redesign and all I did was tweaking the floating of the sidebar using CSS, and change the position with CSS without touching the HTML Structures, except adding some Classes and IDs.

 

@Ken_Xu: has a good point. Just CSS changes will not affect the site's ranking much (that might change in future).

 

If your just changing the layout and not moving the url or, moving links or changing the content substantially there should be no impact.

 

I guess I have to say it will have a significant impact. Having a site structure change will score a new value for googlebot when it crawl your page. New value will be then recalculate, reindex and refresh from the index in Google. It will then cause you a lower SERP ranking with your targeted keywords...