Major Site Update

any chance this will rock the Google boat?

[mahlon]

We are about to push out a very revised version of our existing site that is PR6 and it is a couple of years old. Is there any chance that the change in the site alone will negatively affect PR? The site will have the same titles, keywords and description but the mechanics and layout have changed dramatically. Your feedback is appreciated!

[keyplyr]

Since PR is largely a product of high-ranking and relevant incoming links, then I would not think a site update, as you describe, would negatively affect it. On the contrary, it should help to get the GoogleBot to recrawl your pages.

Google loves "fresh." Changing site content has proven to update Google's cache of the webpage and possibly help to find new linkage, keywords and search relevant themes.

[victor]

mahlon:
Is there any chance that the change in the site alone will negatively affect PR?

One possibility is if you have renamed or deleted pages. Any incoming links to them will 404, and you'll lose the PageRank (and visitors) that those deep-linked pages attracted.

[jaytierney]

If you added a bunch of new pages to the site that are linked to from your index page, it could hurt your site for a month at the very most (if at all) and then you'll be back to normal. That's why with redesigns it's highly recommended to maintain the same file names from before if possible.