ok, one of my sites is having a rebuild from the ground up to make it fully compliant with webstandards and nicer for the user. it was based on an old php script I wrote years ago but this is now outdated. As a result, the site (currently a PR5 homepage and PR 2 and 3 and 0 inner pages) will be completely new design and layout. The site is position 3 in Google for a major keyword and P1 in Yahoo...I dont want to lose my rankings if at all possible (or not for long because I know I will!) Some content will be the same but essentially, Google and the other search engines will see it as a new site. has anyone here done this before with a pretty established 3 year old site that ranks well? What did you do please to avoid being zapped off the SERP radar? I was thinking the following: Use same URLs for well ranked pages, if I cant use same URL then 301 redirect the old one to the new one.... erm..pray I would like to do it one page at a time, but because its a mysql database driven site it is not possible for most pages ...except static ones... All info welcome thanks
As long as you dont change filenames then simply changing the design and back end programing will not impact directly on SEO however any other associated changes there is a risk that it will impact but this could be a positive or negative impact.
This is great to hear as I too am ding something very similar but it'll be a mass overhaul from phpBB2 to 3. Just getting part of our customised backend recoded (major job) and also working with a phpBB3 style designer.