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Home | Google | Do code and page layout changes while moving to new URLs affect search engine rankings?

Do code and page layout changes while moving to new URLs affect search engine rankings?

18/08/2011 19:43:00 Constantine Roussos
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Will changing the code and layout of my pages while moving to new URLs affect their rankings?

 

Here's a question from Richard
in New York who asks I'm
changing the platform
of my blog.
All old URLs will redirect
to new ones.
But since the HTML code and
layout of the pages are
different, do you lose search
engine rankings?
Well, search engine rankings
can change when the page
changes itself.
If you're doing the 301's
correctly, so a permanent
redirect from the old site
to the new site.
And if you're doing at a page
level, so from the old page to
the new page.
You should be in relatively
good shape.
But it's not just
incoming links.
It's also the content
of the page itself.
So if you had a really good
layout with a really clean
design where all the text
was easily indexed.
And you move to something that
was a lot more confusing and
maybe the text wasn't as easy
for us to extract, that could
change your search rankings
for the down
side or for the negative.
In general, we're relatively
good about changing layouts
and being able to still be
able to discern what
that page is about.
But here's one test
that you could do.
As long as you haven't done the
transition yourself, if
you can try to make a few tests
where you can take the
layout of a new page or the new
site and see if you can
apply it in some very simple
ways to the old site, then
that's the way to
isolate those.
Because it's just like any
scientific experiment.
If you do two things at once and
your rankings go down, you
can't decouple what caused it.
Whereas if you can change just
the layout, even if it's only
on a few pages, to sort of try
out and see whether your
rankings change with that, then
you'll know OK, was it
more likely to be because of the
redirects or because I was
changing my HTML layout.
So that's just a little piece of
advice if you want to make
sure that things go a little
more smoothly.
It's always nice if you can test
it, sort of put your toe
in the water, before you
jump in and do a
cannon ball first thing.

 

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