Change Of Site Ownership, Hosting (IP), and Site Redesign...Will This Damage PR/SERP?

Hi,

I've recently acquired a site from here at DP.

The site ranks pretty well for the keyword "ascii art" in Google (page 2), and MSN (page 1)...not so good in Yahoo though (page 9)

My question is this:

I plan on redesigning the site (it's a bit bright, and I want to make it a little more useable, as well as change the ad positioning etc)

Will this affect my SERP - especially considering the site will be physically moving to a new hosting account (and therefore a new IP). Also, because the site will have changed registered owner etc??

I'm guessing it won't affect PR, because the backlinks will remain intact (hopefully)

Thanks in advance,
Steve

 

SERP might change in the short term, but you should be ok after it restabilizes

 

It depends on how much you change. A lot depends on the keywords in your content. If you redesign the layout, it should not affect much but if you change the wording, it could change where you rank for keywords. This could be only temporary and could even improve your ranking if you do a better job at embedding your keywords. I changed my layout three times but kept most of the same content and it changed nothing in the serp. My host even switched servers three times and it had little results either way. The key is in the content of the site.