Can a change in design affect ranking?

hi rubeina,
i have change design of my site which was live since last 2 years and u cant believe all ranking were remain same and not a single drawback of change the desing.
main thing u have to consider is
- keep the size of your template as small as u can. if u use <td><tr> instead of <table> than it will help to reduce the size.
- try to keep same keyword density as it was in old design.
- try to maintain quality of content of the page.

all the best for new design. i got more conversions and traffic a'ter new design.

-jigs

 

Yes, its Effect, maybe you get a google penalty. Google won't love, if someone giving a surprise to him. You should change the design page bit by bit. As Google are script, yeah only script.. and once you changed the incidentally the site design when your site getting ranking, Script will just think its not resemble the old one data which they had recorded.

 

hi fiona,
i m not agree with u.i have totally change the design of my main site and it is doing well sinse last 3 months.
u have to take care of page size.if size will increase than it will take more time to open the page and that may be one reason google give penalty to your site.

 

Hello rubeina,

Changing your site design will not hurt your rankings as long as new design is having clean code and its easily crawlable by search engine.

 

I wasn't saying that.. am not favor of re-designs of site, for getting better ROI and for better looking. My point was that don't change suddenly lookup your site, if you are top on competitive keywords and you have a big database site... because SQL database site sometime get problems, if small thing miss there when we are trying to change our new designs.

Conclusion: You can do that, it will not harmful on anyway, Just let them know to Google that, you want to change your design and you changing in slowly way.

 

Rubeina, unlikely depending on the change, if the text/meta tags/h1 etc all remained exactly the same it shouldn't, especially if your going to CSS and removing tables.

 

it depends on the change. In SEO, sometimes a design change is necessary to put your site on the next level.

A search engine friendly change should help your rankings and vice versa

 

how can google-bot know about your design change? isn't like a text browser?

 

gibex, it's in the code.

 

You will see a notice if you change the code or text too much. The SEs look at the code. If the site overhaul includes a modification of the code, a change can occur.

 

I have changed design more than once a year and there is no impact for search engines as far as my sites concern (with all contents and meta tags intact).

Regards
Edward Han

 

It's not about changing the graphical design that will change your ranking, but about changing the structural design of your site


you replace your logo - no effect, replace your background - no effect, replace buttons - no effect, etc ..

but if you rearrange the site's menu and linking structure - that's where you need to be careful since it can lower your ranking as well as alter it, depending on how well you implemented the changes

 

I changed the design of one of my bigger sites recently, and have seen an increase in traffic...of course I also did a lot more SEO with it, so I'm not sure I can say the design by itself helped...

 

I think the short answer is YES a change of design can make a difference
I know when a changed one of my websites, it made a big difference - however it will depend on what design you are changing from and to
The more Search Engines friendly your design the better, and probably the bigger difference

I changed my design, really based on all the things I had learnt about SEO, so that does explain partly why the site ranked better in the listings

 

If you would only change the design it wont hurt your ranking as long as you still continuing your link building and the content is still the same, the tags, title, alt tags and anything that will affect your ranking.

 

As long as the design is SEO Friendly, it's ok. Don't put some unecessary stuffs that will affect your ranking.

 

If the design is better, things might be the same or be better, if it's lousier compared to the first one, stick to the old one. The design must be easy to navigate. =)

 

im sure its in the w3c standards that <td> and <tr> should be INSIDE a <table> tag.

for starters, stick with the w3c standards as much as possible to ensure future compatibilies with browsers...

its important to use DIV and SPAN tags (ie. CSS) in designs to reduce file size. search engines only read the first x kb of your page so bear this in mind.