We are planning to redesign our website, we just recently achieved Page 2 in google for our keywords - how will the redesign affect our current position?
just redesign your website but take care of simple points defined below. 1. URL - Must be same as old 2. Meta's - Put same meta's as per old site 3. Content - Don't remove old content. add new if you want to add 4. Design - Design is not a factor for google because google mainly consider cached text 5. robot.txt 6. sitemap.xml this points i know.... may be after your new site development your rankings will go up or down but it will come back when you start again SEM activities.
Maybe you will notice some down changes in your position. It's common to my websites when I change something it falls some position but in a month or two it will up even more. Some other people have noticed the same phenomenon.
Why because he isn't changing domains Get access to webmaster tool, if you are dropping any old urls check to see if they have any links pointing to them. If they do use a 301 redirect to take them back to the homepage. Make sure you have a well designed and easy navigateable 404 page that actually returns a 404 error if any of your urls are changing. And as long the new design doesn't bring on a large amount of code bloat and is designed well, alongside the other sensible suggestions above you should be safe. Gavin
well it will not any more but if your code is too complex than previous then it will effect for sometime but in due course it will reach as it was. Google will never drop you for a second if you change design but it only effect when linking structure, javascripts, content and etc were change.
...Only if you are moving the location of the pages. If so, all the redirects need to be 301 "permanent" redirects and they need to be set from the EXACT old URL to the EXACT new URL. Don't redirect everything to the homepage.
thank you for the tips guys. if anybody would be interested in taking a look at our site, please click on my signature - if you could offer advice on what we can improve etc. etc that would be great!
It will be better to redesign this site page by page, not a complete redue. You have the start of the basic SEO but it is not based on solid keyword research. Although many SEOer are doing this: <div id="main"> <h1 id="logo"><a href="#">Exirus Creative: Houston Web Design and Multimedia Company</a></h1> <div id="menu"> <div class="mainmenu"> No where on you page does the text "Exirus Creative: Houston Web Design and Multimedia Company" show up and in the H1 tag, it triggers the "hidden text" filter. This is considered hidden text and will get you gray barred. This is a know Flash SEO workaround, and will not work. Even if Google misses it, your competitors will not and will report you. And be very careful on using Flash navigation. None of the SEs will follow it.
The site is not going to be complicated. It won't have any flash elements whatsoever and we are not changing domain. So... 1. Do we still need 301 redirect? 2. Do we need to send a new sitemap? 3. What do we do with the other pages that have been cached by Google? 4. If we name the links the same way as the old links, but there is different content (although still related) - how will that affect the ranking? So far we are getting good result in our off-site optimization. Thanks ya'll for the tips and advice.