We have an ecommerce site that ranks at #1 for 2 of our keywords and at #5 for another. The site is a major source of income for us. The site is also starting to look very dated and some of the content needs to be updated. While we get good traffic, our conversion is not what I'd like to see, and I think some of our potential customers are put off by the "look" of the site. I did some googling and found varying opinions on the impact a redesign would have of ranking (and I looked at the thread here from the beginning of the year), so I thought I would ask the experts here what they thought, given Google's latest changes. The site is currently laid out with tables and inline styles (using the old NVU....). As you might imagine, it is quite clunky. We'd like to convert it to a css design. All the pages will remain in place, with the current URLs and much of the link structure intact, although some of the anchor text may change, and the navigation location will change from its current sidebar to a top bar with drop-down menus. We could do this in stages (e.g., a page at a time, or revamp content and then layout). I suspect much of the on-page and within site SEO optimization would be improved during the redesign (for example, there are currently no alt tags for images, and no h1, h2 tags used--just bold and italics and font changes to highlight titles). What do you think???
I would make the style changes - send that live, and wait until all pages are re-cached. Then I would bring page contents up to date with the improved onpage SEO a few at a time In other words - the only thing Google might not like is all the pages being amended at once
If You change with layout linking structure You can lost Your posotions. If You change only LAYOUT it is SAFE
The links will still point to the same places, but the navigation looks very different and takes advantage of css. The links are currently in a narrow table sidebar, so are limited in length of the anchor text. The current design has drop down menus with more descriptive anchor text (and uses our keywords). Because of the design we can even add a few links to the front page without making it confusing to the visitor. Any guesses how Google will respond??
About a year ago, I completly redevloped one of my sites, changing to using PHP instead of html. I had put off doing this for many years with the fear of losing my Google positions. However, after completing the redesign, and then using a 301 redirect for the old pages, my site virtually remained unchanged in Google. I guess that if you change the design side of the site, but keep the content and links and page names the same, then you shouldn't be affected in a negative way. Best to change a couple of pages at a time, so you can see if the new design works better for both search engine positions, as well as conversions of visitors to your site into sales. Good luck Alex
Ya,you should do it gradually! my experience you can redesign it but you need keep the content sequence in code,but not the display, Googlebot crawl your page line-by-line.
I redesign and work with client sites daily and 9 times out of ten th site is not effected in a negative way, the few times I have seen changes is when they have been accidentally cloaking text or keyword stuffing and I have removed these before they got detected.
The 301 redirect is important. We've redesigned our pages at least four times the past 10 years and there was no real problem. Howevever, we - sticked with the URLs if at all possible - if not, we used proper 301s - we were very carefully with the linking structure What I would be concerned about is the menus. If that means the links are only visible when JavaScript is executed, I would seriously consider if that is a good move... Rainer
oh, and I forgot to mention: keep you page titles! One time, we accidently had changed the titles, which caused keywords to disappear or to be too far in the back. That severely hit our ranking. When we fixed it, however, the ranking was restored. The whole process took half a year, though...