Will a new design affect my current ranking?

Worried that my ranking will drop due to the change in code.

[ItzFX]

First a bit of background on the website I am talking about:
Our website is about 8 years old and has PR5 (didn’t start on SEO until about a year ago) on our front page with PR4 on some of the more popular pages. We enjoy healthy rankings on a variety of terms for our niche, and have recently achieved #1 placement for the biggest “prize keyword” on all three major engines.
And here’s the part that’s killing me:
I have recently started on a new design for our website, one that is more user-friendly and optimized for search engines. The new design is testing well, but it changes a lot of the HTML code on our website. URLs and links remain consistent with the old design, and all backlinks should still work after implementing the new design (just a brand new look for the user).
I am wondering if changing the HTML so much on over 6,000 pages will affect my ranking on the search engines that bring me about 1/3 of the traffic to our website. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?
Thanks to all that help me with this!

[texasville]

>>>>URLs and links remain consistent with the old design,<<<<

This has been discussed before and I believe the general consensus was...If the urls remain the same and the linking is unchanged then you should have no problem.
If you are thinking about changing a lot of content throughout the site, I would do that slowly.

[drshields]

I recently unrolled a site redesign, and my page rank dropped from 5 to 3. After about 3 weeks, page rank is at 4.

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

I have did this on three sites during the last 12 months and the only results have been positive. If you maintain the same URLs, similar SEO and do not radically change the content you will probably be fine.

[ItzFX]

First, thank you to all that have replied.
So far I see two votes saying that it should be alright, and one vote saying I should be a bit weary of the change.
texasville – is it possible to post a link to the thread you mentioned?
Thanks again!

[texasville]

Try this one..pretty informative: [webmasterworld.com...]

[undecided]

I'm about 3/4 of the way through a very similar transition with what sounds like a similarly positioned site. I have not seen any effect whatsoever, but I've done the transition site section by site section over about a 30 day period. One positive side effect is changing the format sort of forces me to verify all links and make minor content improvements as I go along. Sloppy to have non-functional links, I know, but I'm easily distracted.

[ItzFX]

Thanks for the link texasville.
It seems more like a mixed bag of results according to the link you posted. The option of implementing the new design slowly is not an option, as the design is completely different and would only serve to confuse our visitors.
I will probably go ahead and try out the new design anyways, as I am confident that I can get back on the SERPs even if we do get wiped... We will just have to bear it for 2 months (that seems to be the average).
Thanks again!

[charlie3]

If your site buys the groceries and pays the mortgage and google is important changing things is risky.

After 9 months working hard on a non-commercial site (a pure labor of love) there was totally satisfying rankings in google that also seemed appropriate. Then I made the mistake of reading the Google guidelines which said the best thing for Google is to make the best site for visitors--bad advice.

The site design that Goole liked had the content divided into many small pages--a design that evolved as the site was created with no thought about search engines. The drawback was visitors ignored much of the content.

I combined the content onto a smaller number of larger pages with bookmarks to locations on pages instead of so many hyperlinks to individual pages. Visitors loved the change but Google rankings declined drastically.

I reacted by bringing the small pages back but linking them via the site index where they could be seen but would be mostly ignored by visitors who would find the identical content on pages designed for them instead of Google.

While making the transition to this arrangement I unintentionally made a global change in link types via Frontpage on a page with several hundred internal links. The next morning the site was completely gone from Google, zero referrals from them, and 75% less visitors. (The site remains as before in the other search engines.)

After the ban I tried, for the first time, to buy adwords referring to the site and was successful. Money talks.