One page in particular on my website ranks number one for a very relevant phrase, in relation to the content of my site. And this page is ancient, it looks terrible, and offers only a barely visible, hard to find link to the forums associated with the site and the new front end. If I completely change this page, will my google ranking for the search term which ranks that page number one on google, be affected by my changes? if I save the page as exactly the same name, in the same place?
Avoid changing the URL if possible. If you DO change the URL, remember to 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL. This WILL likely cause a temporary dip in rankings and traffic, but should recover once all inbound links to the old page have been recrawled, the 301 redirect discovered for each inbound link, and credit for each inbound link to the old URL (and the associated link text) gets transfered to the new URL. Do not change <title> as it is the most influential on page SEO factor. If at all possible, also avoid changing other major on-page SEO factors like <h1> and <h2>s if you have them and they contain all or part of the keyword phrase you're ranking for... Avoid changing the link text used by other pages on your site that link to the page in question as well as which pages on your site link to the page in question. Simply changing colors, styles, and maybe some of the content on the page should make noticeably big differences in your rankings. Puff... Puff... Pass.
Thankyou very much, mate, for that detailed response... I have no plans of changing anything other than the colours, graphics and links... if this is the case, I can expect no change for the worse of the indexing of that page on google? Sorry, for asking what may already be answered in the above post, but I want to be 100% sure, or near to it, that I won't lose the surprisingly high ranking this page gets for a certain phrase on google...
If you change anything in the body, it may very well change the ranking. You should be very careful and do changes 1 at a time. If you're going to change only the layout, I don't think much will change. Be sure to use css so you can make changes easily. Ofcourse, nothing in life is certain, so you shouldn't just blindly follow this advice.
The page in question is this one:> http://www.weedguru.com/spliff.php and my plan was to leave it, as it is, other than add a paragraph in near the top, with links to the new front end at www.weedguru.com and also the forums, complete with image, at http://www.weedguru.com/forum/index.php. My reason for doing this, is after investigating the most frequent page people come to on my website, via search engines, i have found this page massively the winner. and as it looks...let say...fairly basic...i want to in the very least, add in links to the more visually acceptable, enticing and alive areas of my website. So if all I am doing is adding in those links, in the body, will I affect my google ranking adversely? ( i am using dreamweaver, and changing things, if, or when I do, through basic html additions to the code for the page)
Last December, I changed EVERY page on our site (over 4000 pages)... Every URL changed... The templates for the page changed... We converted from .asp/.aspx pages to using a CMS. The CSS changed... literally everything changed. At the same time I made lots of improvements from an SEO perspective (URL canonicalization, using <h1> & <h2>s on EVERY page that reinforced the <title>, etc.) While it was a VERY scary process, within a couple weeks we were ranking better than before. So, of course, it all depends on what you do and how well you planned the changes as to the results you get. But generally speaking, my experience has been that the CSS and HTML generated has very little impact on ranking (things like Code:Content ratios, source order coding, etc.) They are basically super fine tuning SEO techniques. Even the actual text on the page seems to have minor impacts on how it ranks. The most important ranking factors IMO are: 1) Inbound links from other sites as well as your own which as long as you don't change the URL, don't change the link text other pages on your site use to link to that page, and/or don't change the internal linking structure of your site... shouldn't be affected. 2) <title> most important on-page factor 3) <h1> which should reinforce the <title> 4) <h2>s which should reinforce the <title> 5) name of the page (i.e. keyword rich URLs) So I tend to avoid messing with these too much. Making minor tweaks to the content of the page shouldn't drastically affect rankings unless you're removing occurences of the keywords or keyword phrase that it's currently ranking for. On-page SEO doesn't carry NEAR the weight as your URL's inbound links.
Well yes if you are changing the URL of the page then all the links coming to that page will be gone as they were linking to the page with older name so it will effect your rankings try not to change this. If you really wanna change the name make sure that you also make the all the sites linking to that page start point to the new URL.
If you change the page's URL... then 301 redirect the old URL to the new URL. This will transfer credit for inbound links to the old URL (and their associated link text) over to the new URL. Be SURE it's a 301... 302 redirects do NOT transfer credit for inbound links.
Any changes, especially major ones which it sound like you wish to make WILL effect your Google rankings. Obviously colours and small changes will not, so long as you keep the same title, description, keywords, link hierarchy, image alt tags and script layout, you should be OK.
I am not planning on changing any of the 'so long as you keep' elements...Only adding in a clear link to the forums. Which will comprise of one image and a small piece of text. Nothing else will change...So if that is the case, is it safe to proceed?
So, can I assume then...that it is safe for me to add in, one image and link to the page in question, changing no keywords, nor the URL...just one image with a link.????