Comments on: Refresh, Renew, Redesign

By: Diane

Diane — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:00:49 +0000

Thanks everyone for your kind comments!

Mike, if the only thing you’re changing is the look and feel — the color scheme, the pretty pictures, that sort of thing — there shouldn’t be any effect on rankings. Search engines spiders are essentially “blind.” I often tell people to look at the text-only cache of their pages in Google to see how they look to the spiders.

If, when the design is done, the text-only cache “looks” pretty much the same as before, you should be OK.

But if you change anything that likely counts toward rankings — the anchor text of internal navigation links, the overall site architecture, any of the on-page text, alt attributes of images (especially if those images are also links), etc. — then there could very well be an effect on rankings.

By: Mike Kirk personal trainer Leicester

Mike Kirk personal trainer Leicester — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:18:37 +0000

if the content and URL stays the same, but the design changes will it affect rankings??

By: Kennewick Colleen

Kennewick Colleen — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:03:27 +0000

We are in the midst of converting our website to a WordPress blog. We will have numerous 301s to do as a result. We’ll keep our fingers crossed Google sorts things out correctly.

By: Dr. Cover

Dr. Cover — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 12:36:25 +0000

Site redesign might be a real stress for your business.
There are several bad things you should be ready for:
- Errors in new scripts
- Wrong displaying of a new design in different browsers
- Not-found errors due to wrong redirects or missed files
- Lower positions in Google SER due to different content layout and formatting.

So, you must constantly monitor all that things (SERP, error logs, statistics) after uploading a new design to server.

Overall, I agree with your points, Diane. Thank you for the useful checklist.

By: The Agra Indian

The Agra Indian — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 12:27:07 +0000

Great tips Diane,

Re-designing can be pain full some times if you loose the link popularity and page rank. 301 redirect method is very help full to easily overcome this situations.

By: Tom Bradshaw

Tom Bradshaw — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:30:30 +0000

I do alot of redesigns of old sites, which look pretty awful – a new professional website is more likely to get a company customers than a dated one. This coupled with good SEO will really help a business, especially as more people are going online to find businesses.

Those are good tips aswell Diane, especially researching real-world keywords, I try to tell clients to use common sense when deciding on keywords – what would an average person search for?