Hey Guys I have recently taken over a charity website. I will be putting up a new site on the domain, which has a PageRank 3. Will putting the new site up drop me down the ranks in google?
Probably not, it might even give you a fresh content ranking at first, but this is temporary. As long as your new layout is just as optimized or better than the old one, without overdoing it, and you're not changing any content and incoming links, i don't see how it could go wrong.
Maintaining the same link structure where possible will help ensure the off-page ranking factors by securing backlinks to the site; and updating the content, taking the opportunity to tweak on page factors will not hurt your site, but likely help
Make sure that urls stay the same; however, if you site uses dynamic urls, rewrite them as static *.html is good instead.
I just did a redesign on a site not too long ago. Put up 301's and changed the old URL structure to a much better URL structure that SEO friendly. They now get 100% more traffic and are up from 4-5 leads a day to 10-18 leads a day. That was just a recent example. There are many others. Needless to say, doing a site redesign can be very beneficial, as long as you know what you need to do.
Guys, thats great! Thanks for all your comments. The site has been severly neglected (as in no updates for over 2 yrs!) but the domain is about 4 yrs old. There are very few links at present, and this is one of the things I am looking to rectify. Cheers again for your help DD
I recently helped roll out a major change on a giant website for a huge company that sells medical supplies. We kept the same pages and names and only changed the content and coding where needed. There was a drop at first that lasted about 2 months (but not big enough to hurt). The biggest change was that the more targeted site converted better. We had less traffic, but the conversions (money) were better.
Most likely not but it depends on how you will redesign it and whether if you will keep the current structure