I am planning on changing the design of my website completely and linking it better. It has been long coming and I am finally getting around to it. I have the new site designed. The content is almost completely the same expect that I am going to split some of the pages into several pages. Recently in the PR update I was able to go for PR0-PR1 for my homepage and most of my interal pages got PR n/a- PR1 and some even got a PR2. My question is am I going to ruin my SERPs and PR by changing everything around? Some of the pages I can leave alone, others are simply to long and would be a much better user experience if it was broken up among several pages with better navigation. I am planning on keeping all of the URLs that I currently have and just adding a few more. Any thoughts? Anyone else ever do this? What happened? Did you tank in the SERPs? I am more worried about SERPs then PR. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
If you just redesign the pages then that is ok, but if you will change the content and pages urls, then you may lost SERPs
Changing the designs will not have a significant impact so don't worry. If you change the permalinks/url then its a whole different story.
Aslong as you keep the existing URL's you have then its no big worry, its just if your were to change the URL's for all the inner pages you would have taken a big hit.
so if I split up one really long page and put half the content on the original URL and the second half on a different URL I am going to lose SERPs?
Does anyone else have a suggestion? If I break up one of my really long page into say three different pages am I going to lose SERPs? I am going to keep the original URL as the first page and then two new URLS for page two and three? I am very concerned.
You may lose some ranking from that page. But in the long run, splitting the pages up will allow you focus each page to a section of your business, meaning it is a positive move going forward for your business.
Changing your page design can have consequences. I have read many stories of how changes to "the container" your information is kept in, has effected serps. If you can imagine that you were the machine you can see its point. You have 10000 pages and all of them have suddenly changed, that means you have to reassess everything. Changing the way your information is organised can also have effects on serps. If you have a page that had one link to it from one other of your pages this indicates the information is NOT that important. If you then have that same page organised so that it is accessible by 50 links from other pages, its importance ranking in your site has changed. The robots will see this change and perhaps reflect it in your serps, once they have re-crawled your entire site. Any changes you make to your site can have effect, both positive and negative. To keep yourself sane, I believe that if you make changes that are beneficial to your user and that is the only reason you are making them, you will sleep well how ever your serps are effected. The reason for this is, even if you don't get as many hits, your users will enjoy the experience on your site and be able to get the information they are looking for easier. This in turn means they are more likely to add you to favorite and come back again for more.
What do you call a long page? If an article is written correctly, summary at the top informative subheading and more detail down the pages, people are prepared to scroll now-a-days. Screen resolutions today are growing, however with the economic turn down the rate at which they grow may well slow. 1024 x 768 with a readable size font on it does not hold much information. People have learned to scroll for stuff they are interesting, as long as you have given them a clue, in the summary and sub-headings especially, there might be something they want further down the page. There is also an argument for internal anchor links at the top of the page to your sub-headings. This would allow even easier access to a long page.
I agree with giving the interan anchor to sub headings. The information I am talking about is different medication for a particular disease. Very boring stuff but stuff that you would really want to know just the same. This isn't a pharmacutical site selling anything in fact it has a few products for sale as herbal products. I just wanted to break the pages up to make them more readable and enjoyable.