Complete website redesign affects SEO??

Hi Guys

I have a query in my mind. Although I have my own opinion on my query but want to discuss with you all SEO geeks.
I have a Wordpress website doing well in search results. My client want to redesign his website completely. The first question he asked me is that will doing this affect my SEO rankings. There will be no change in URL's and content & products will be same but complete design will be changed. Website will be down for some technical reasons for 2-3 hours. Is there any negative effect caused due to this redesign? I told him that nothing will change.
Whats your opinion on this?

 

Redesign affects the health of a site even if you leave content, parmalink structure as is. I have faced the issue earlier.
I don't think couple of hours of downtime will affect too hard. Just put a maintenance notice and take it down.

 

Okay thats cool. But what you suggest do we avoid redesign? And at what extent you suffered when you faced the same issue?

 

As long as content, and meta tags remain same, Re design won't affect your ranking,infact strong chances that it may rank well in google.

 

As long as content, and meta tags remain same, Re design won't affect your ranking,in fact strong chances that it may rank well in Google.

 

yes, after a re-design always a website will drop rankings, always always...

 

At what extent?? I was reading below post they are saying there will be no change at all until you change your URL structure.

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2070968/SEO-Website-Redesign-Relaunching-Without-Losing-Sleep

 

well if you have 1000 visits per month you will have 700 for 3-4 months
after that your rankings will return to normal, try a soft link building after you made your redesign and maybe you can safe some of your lost traffic..

 

Yeah thats true. Thanks passcrk2005.

 

Can ask will changing of site themes affect too ?

 

Redesign of a website can give positive or negative effect, it depends how you do redesign if your redesign is more SEO friendly than before then you would get the benefit.

 

I've been through many re-designs without any negative SEO benefits (As long as I wasn't changing urls or doing a bunch of redirects). In fact most times, the redesign helped SEO efforts because of better on page, better internal linking, cleaner code, less scripting, faster load times.