Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I am about to change my website totally, brand new design. I was wondering if it is going to have any effect on my ranking ? ( I know it will for my subpages see that they won't have the same web address but what about the homepage )
I am worried see that I rank in the top 5 of google for a fairely competitive keyword.
I am also considering changing my hosting company ( taking a us host instead of a European host where I am currently )
Can changing host hurt my ranking ?
Thank you,
Site redesign means that the content on the page will likely change. You will likely not have the exact same words appear on each of your new pages in the exact same order and position on the page as they appeared on the old pages. Since the content on your pages will be changing they will not rank in the same positions for the same terms as before.
Changing your URLs can have extreme impacts on your ranking. This is probably the change that will MOST impact your rankings. Even if you were NOT doing a redesign, anytime you rename a web page you can cause your rankings to drop because Google and others see it as a totally different page.
Imagine if your have a page about topic A and it's old URL is http://www.example.com/folder/topica.html and its new URL is http://www.example.com/folder/topica.php. Assume also the old page had 1000 inbound links from other relevant web sites with various link text like "topica", "topic a", "learn more about topic a", etc. causing it to rank well for the term "topic a".
If you change the URL, the engines will see this as a brand new page with NO inbound links other than the ones on your site. See the problem here? Suddenly you are starting all over like a brand new web page getting it to rank.
You need to learn about 301 redirects and implement them on a page by page basis to tell the crawlers that the old URL is no longer valid and that the new equivalent page was permanently moved to the new URL's location. The spiders will not only replace the old URL in their indexes with the new one, but they will also give the new URL credit for the 1000 inbound links to the old URL.
Before embarking on a site redesign and changing URLs, you want to REALLY understand 301 redirects - how to implement them and why they are so important. There are plenty of posts here and on the web about the topic.
PS: Even when properly implementing 301 redirects for all changed URLs, you should expect your rankings to take a hit for some period of time... depending on how often they crawl your site and the other web sites that link to your site. You might see a drop in rankings for several months. If your site traffic and/or products purchases are seasonal, I would recommend that you make the change during the time of the year when you have the least traffic. For instance, if most of your purchases are around Christmas then do NOT implement your new site just before Christmas.
[edited by: ZydoSEO at 11:32 pm (utc) on Feb. 14, 2009]
If your customer base is in the US or you have a global business and you want to rank at Google.com, then I would recommend having a non-country specific TLD like .com and hosting your site in the US.
If your customer base is in the UK for instance and you want to rank at Google.co.uk then I would recommend having a .co.uk TLD and hosting your site in the UK.
[edited by: ZydoSEO at 11:38 pm (utc) on Feb. 14, 2009]
I believe the new on but want to make sure.
Thanks,
