Re-doing my entire site, how badly will I get hurt in the serps?

will i lose pagerank or authority

[sore66]

Right now Google spiders me often and places my site on the front page for many terms.

I want to gut about 70% of my site and start "fresh" while still keeping the pagerank and quick spidering.

How much page rank and 'authority' will I lose?

[caveman]

Just to be clear, what do you mean by "gut"?
- Change page contents?
- Change page URI's?
- Other?

Makes a big difference.

Starting point: If at all possible, since you have lots of highly ranking pages, and assuming that you care about that, you should:
- Keep page URI's
- Change content gradually, and in ways that are related to current page contents.

[66sore]

Gradualism. That's what I've been doing. I'm editing affiliate links on my blog, deleting a few entries but mostly making gradual changes.

By "gut" I mean making some blog posts go aaway, and editing others post facto.

One thing I have learned for sure, descriptive hyperlinks rock!

I just wonder how much change the spider will absorb, guess I should just do this over the course of a few weeks.

[caveman]

Sounds like you're doing it to improve quality, and if so, or close to that, then it sounds like a good plan.

And yes, if it involves a large percentage of the site, I'd probably opt for doing it somewhat gradually (though I'm not certain that doing it all at once would be bad). Still there are examples and reports of large scale changes hurting sites, so why not take it gradually, as you say.

I'd be most careful about changes on pages that are ranking well, that you also want to keep ranking well. FWIW.

[arran]

66sore and sore66?! I'm confused...

[sore66]

so am I!

ok, so begins a marathon session to improve qaulity.

I am also going to be working on making my image tags more likely to be picked up by the serps.