Overhauling an entire web site

will this kill its rank?

[roldar]

I've been hired to overhaul the web site of a small company with only a handful of products. Their current web site was built with a WYSIWYG editor, and generally looks amateurish. The site also doesn't offer an online order system (all was previously done by mail in order).

This company invented and has a patent on their few products. I'm somewhat amazed that they are #1 on Google when you search for their products, because they have several online distributors with very SE friendly sites.

So my question is, if I radically change the layout and much of the copy, will this put its SE rank at risk?

Also, the company is being gouged by a local isp/hosting company, so I intended to move the site to a better host. Will this put the rank at risk?

[lammert]

The main question would be if the incomming links are only pointing to the homepage, or that a lot of internal pages also have outside links pointing to them.

Page rank is calculated on the number of incomming links per page, so if you redesign the site and most internal pages get removed or renamed the site will certainly lose some ranking in Google. So you might try a redesign where filenames stay the same.

[mikec]

i'd keep a backup of the old site regardless. b4 launching the new site, make sure it is totally complete. if you're using any cms or dynamic page urls, be sure to fix that using mod-rewrite. if you are going to have the url structure different, be sure to permanently redirect all of the old pages to the new ones.

chances are it may definately effect your ranking, but ya never know.