I have a website that is ranked very well with a competitive keyword on Google. The site design has got tables, it has got error in code and it loads slow. To remove all these errors and to make it a CSS based table-less design, I have already started working on it. Before launching it and replacing it with my existing website, I am worried if I could face the following 1:- Can I be Sandboxed? If yes, how long is that period? 2:- Will I loose my rankings? 3:- Do I need to have the exact descriptions, keywords, titles, alt tags or I may try changing it? Please give me your feedback on this. Thanks HaXan
i recently re worked my site, the first one in my sig below, the seprs drop for around a week then it went back up to where it was before the site redesign. if you are moving or renaming any pages dont forget to use 301 redirects. Kathryn.
also regarding :3:- Do I need to have the exact descriptions, keywords, titles, alt tags or I may try changing it? i would recomended keeping the title and description if its working well for you, i removed a lot of alt tags in the re work and it made little to no difference.
Done it a few times. Stick to one thing at a time, keep everything the same and change only the design. Take the next step once you are sure all new pages are indexed. Massive sitewide changes better be done slow.
I am building the same content on the new design offline and I have plans to change it right away once I feel it is exactly the same. Can I ask this question to someone in Google for an exact answer? If yes, how can I?
changing the page titles will change your ranking. it happened to me and took weeks to recover.. dont' change the page titles!
Agreed. If you are happy with your market share of search traffic, then try to keep the seo aspects the same... Removing html code (table elements) will only help in my opinion if that is all you are doing. It helps isolate the actual content of the page better. Good for contextual advertising.
If you make changes in ur coding part i think ur ranking in serp remain same, but yes if you r going to make some changes in content & other on page factors the serp ranking may vary. Your site never go to sand box with the new designing, i think ur redesigning helps you to get better position in serp. Best of luck Day Kevi
>>>1:- Can I be Sandboxed? If yes, how long is that period? The sandbox effect refers to new sites and has nothing to do with changing you site template. >>>2:- Will I loose my rankings? Going from a tabled design to a tabless design is not going to effect you content. >>>3:- Do I need to have the exact descriptions, keywords, titles, alt tags or I may try changing it? I would keep the meta description, title tag, h1 tag, etc if they are good. But this is not going to make any more difference than if you tweaked them now.
I think if you do a redesign, while keeping the content intact, ti shouldn't affect your SERPs at all.
i just did a website redesign last week and i noticed a 50% drop of traffic since 2 days ago.. my adsense revenue dropped also without a doubt. i did changes on all the main landing category pages (changes on the page names and putting them into a folder hierarchy structure). i did a 301 redirect on all the old pages to the new ones in their respective new folders. i redo my google xml sitemap and yahoo urlllist.txt to be resubmitted with all the new URLs and removing all the old ones. i also changed all the internal linkings to change to the new URL changed pages. All the changed pages are becoming more table-less and there is also a change in the text navigation css format (but still remains the same as text). when i checked my site statistics analysis report using hitslink, i found out that most of the traffic which i gotten were for google image searches and a few yahoo and msn of course. i know this is normal for a website redesign and hopefully my traffic will improve over time as i am thinking of long term impact. i wonder how long should i wait for my google traffic to be as what it were before the site redesign? anyone had any experience or idea? should i wait till next PR update or next 2 weeks or so? can it be months? also i noticed there is not just a drop in traffic for those changed pages but site wide traffic (meaning other pages rankings also dropped subsequently). this is really like a tsunami to me.... i hope its temporary.