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I'm a long time lurker here on the forums and now I've decided to pay my dues and start using it properly :)
I run 5 sites all related to the same industry and my best performing site is old and stale. Occasionally new content is added, probably on a monthly basis, adding maybe 1 or 2 pages.
It performs well and 60% of my income is generated by this site. But the problem is, its ugly, heavy and doesn't follow W3C guidelines. I've been reluctant to change the site as its rankings for very tough keywords are simply amazing. The site has been online for over 5 years now so I think this is a major contribting factor to why it still remains so high in the SERP's.
If I redo the site making it lighter and simpler do you think this could potentially have a negative affect on my rankings? I'm very unsure if I should touch it as I certainly don't want to bring the rankings down.
It ranks really really well but of course, it could be better!
Any advice appreciated.
Deester
i wont think too touch the website which has been giving me good money
but giving only few pages say 1-2 new touch and see the results would be interesting.
good luck with your change
One reasonably safe place to start would be using CSS to clean out FONT tags if you haven't done that already.
I wrote more heavy, clunky pages than I'd like to admit, but when I learned to use CSS to make my HTML leaner and cleaner, I never noticed any negative effects on rankings from updating a page. I was always careful to keep the same textual content, unless I needed to update it for other reasons.
If I redo the site making it lighter and simpler do you think this could potentially have a negative affect on my rankings?
Based on my experience, no. But, don't take that as an absolute. My thinking is that anything you do to improve the user experience usually translates to increased visibility with the search engines. Making a site lighter and simpler is definitely a major step in improving the user experience.
You can always start with redesigning a particular section of the site and see how that performs. I'm a strong believer in anything you do to improve the rendering of your page via CSS, semantic markup, etc., always (from my experience) translates into positives.
In most redesigns, you are moving from a table based layout to a CSS based layout. You may still use tables but not for the main elements of the site. In the process of redesign, hopefully you are also validating against at least a 4.01 Transitional DOCTYPE. I prefer HTML 4.01 Strict and XHTML 1.0 Strict.
Another aspect of redesign is changing the text to html ratio. Eliminating all that old deprecated presentational markup and replacing it with new semantic markup being controlled through CSS is a big plus. Feed the spider more content and less markup. Provide the shortest path possible to your core content.
If you plan on restrucuturing the site, be prepared to take a hit for a month or two while your new pages are being indexed. You can always set up 301 redirects for the old pages to the new pages. This will effectively transfer all credit to the new pages. But, if your site has been online for five years, I'd be reluctant to change the structure at this point, that would take careful consideration. You may end up building the new site around the old site.
That said, you could consider:
Step 1) Leave the old pages alone
Step 2) New pages from now - make them in the new style
Step 3) Take the content from the old pages, and make new pages with that content and leave both up running. Link only to the new page. This way, you will still get search engine traffic as before, but the non-SE visitors get the new pages.
Step 4) If you are getting different placement / different type of traffic with the new pages, leave the 2 parallel pages indefinitely. If the traffic is the same, you can remove the old pages and redirect to the new pages.
The only drawback with this, though, is that some may say you will get a duplicate content penalty because you have got 2 similar pages. This is a risk you take, but in my experience it has not been a problem with my sites.
Once you redo it, give it some time for the bots and ever changing algos to re-rank it and check to see how it compares to your old design rankings for that page. If it is favorable and consistent for a period of time, then redo more. If not, then you may want to reconsider the whole plan.
I've decided to go ahead and introduce my simplified site one step at a time based on the information from here. I'll redo some of the deeper pages on the site and wait to see what kind of reaction I recieve from the SE's.
Again, thank to everyone for their help :)
Deester
If you do think that, then you should indeed leave everything alone.
Otherwise, simplify the HTML as much as possible, while keeping the actual content the same. After all, less ballast means better accessability to the stuff that matters, both for human visitors and search engine spiders alike.
