Will site redesign adding CSS cause page rank drop

I've redesigned a site with CSS but wonder about the consequences.

[cosmokid]

Here's a stupid question....wondering if someone here might be able to help me figure this out.

I have a PR5 site created two years ago, updated several times a week, and while that sounds hunky-dory, I didn't realize at the time that my designer had loaded about a million different sized white "images" as part of the design. So load time for the site has always been an issue for dialup people because each of those white images (invisible to the eye because they just fill in the background on the page) have to load individually. It's fine on Broadband, though.

So over the last two years I've done my best to become a smart web person, learned CSS, Photoshop, SEO, all that good stuff and now have my redesign for the site all ready....a nice clean CSS design, very optimized yet still keeping the personality and content of the old version of the my site. I intend to keep all the original file names and leave the internal navigation of the site the same, just load a new CSS stylesheet and use a different layout on the pages.

The stupid question is...will that screw me up? I had thought that keeping the same file names for all the pages, plus the same navigation, should keep the spiders happy when they view the new page, but I'm still a little superstitious about suddenly losing page rank and all that organic traffic overnight because the site is being served through a completely new design template and things are laid out a bit differently.

What do the veterans think? When I upload the new site, which is more likely to happen:

a) All will be exactly the same with traffic, PR, etc.;

b) There could be a momentary dip of a few months until the spiders get used to the redesign;

c) I disappear from the search engines and end up starting over again, reborn as Ms. Crankypants.

I have over 2000 backlinks, so that's a good thing.

Thanks in advance for feedback!

Cosmokid

[Quadrille]

If the content of most pages is pretty much the same, and the titles and navigation is unchanged, then you should almost certainly notice nothing at all - except quicker page loading.

Do double check the navigation with xenu. And if other changes are planned, give the SEs chance to spider the site a couple of times first.

[The Cheap one]

your PR value might drop a little bit, but nothing noticable or drastic, but in the long run it'll only help you and make your site better. And no your site wouldn't be off the SERP's unless you change something like the metatags or tha content. Then there might a drop in the listing of your site in the SERPS.

[swa66]

In general I've seen no negative impact of converting to CSS as fas as search engines go. [me getting upset over the idiocies in MSIE and impact on old browsers are the biggest concerns]

CSS takes out a lot of clutter, so understanding your site is easier for the spider.

Order of things and appropriate use of tags such as <h1> <h2> etc will make it easier to spot structure, and you can play with that order as well.

As long as you keep the old URLs you are good as far as my experience goes.

Anybody giving you dozens of differently sized blank images is a fool. You could stretch that transparent 1x1 pixel image to any size you needed long before CSS got in use.

[cosmokid]

Thanks very much everyone!

Second stupid question...what's xenu, other than Tom Cruise's best friend? Is this a CSS code validation tool or something? Apologies again for the ignorance :)

Cosmokid

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Cosmokid I did exactly what you are suggesting and my personal experience was that this has absolutely no detrimental effect to your rankings in the long or short term. Go for it!

[Quadrille]

Second stupid question...what's xenu, other than Tom Cruise's best friend? Is this a CSS code validation tool or something?

It's a handy tool for checking navigation and more. Xenu is your friend.

And if you don't know xenu, Google is your friend. ;)

There is an indirect Tom Cruise connection, but that's for a foo thread. :)

[rashmeeforum]

hi!
i'm Raj working as seo specialist. what i know css is a script
by which we can animate our site without any hampering our website rank.

bye.......

[edited by: SuzyUK at 10:45 am (utc) on Nov. 3, 2006]
[edit reason] Please no URLs : see TOS #13 [WebmasterWorld.com] [/edit]

[loongtim]

I agree with everyone else that you shouldn't see too much variation if all you've done is change the layout and style with CSS. Where you might see some changes is if you've changed some of the structural markup (e.g. if you've replaced an H1 with an image or class).

But, given a strong IBL portfolio and all the improvements you're making, you'll be better off in the long run. Some people are afraid to touch a page that's doing well for fear it will stop working. Don't fall into that trap, because it can almost always perform better. Testing for better traffic and conversions should be an ongoing process.

[simonuk]

I have updated more than a two dozen websites from tables/invalid code to CSS and valid code. Every single one of them increased their position on the major engines.