Site makeover - any danger?

Leave well alone or go for it?

[diggle]

Hi.
I am considering having a makeover on my website to make it look more professional. It does very well but looks slightly home-made because it is homemade...
I get good rankings on Google (No 1 in the UK for certain main keyword phrases) and do not want to jeopardise this.
Should I leave well enough alone or, if I have a makeover, what should I avoid?
Currently, there are no flash, javascript or frames on there (don't really want it) and people say the site is easy to navigate.
I guess I just want to make it look a bit more sophisticated. What should I do?

[webdev]

Should be fine so long as you keep the same page names and the good content.

Recently done mine and it stayed good PR.

Links count big time to make sure they are also kept pointing to the correct pages.

Biggest thing about a site redisign is the users point of view.

People seem to like what they know, and can be put off by changes until they get used to them again.

If you have a mailing list it may be good to pre-warn people.

[ncw164x]

Change the layout of the site but keep all your content page titles, description and meta tags the same. If you use graphic's for navigation also include text hyperlinks as an alternative

[edited by: ncw164x at 10:08 pm (utc) on Feb. 27, 2003]

[korkus2000]

I just redesigned a site 2 months ago and it didn't affest ranking at all. Just don't change the content and titles and you should have no problems.

[tigger]

I rebuilt a clients a site that had been stick at 3rd place for months, last month it moved to 1st :) let’s hope it stays there again after the next update

[ExtremeExports]

I just posted a similar topic a couple of weeks ago. I was considerign redesigning my site and asked for opinions. I have finally posted the new site design, and have had nothing but positive feedback. Now I have to wait for the next update in March to see if I loose pagerank or not. But reading through this thread I don't think I will. I do have image links now, but as an alternative at the bottom of each page have inserted text links also. And of course the content has not changed, if anything I've added more content. So I am hoping everything goes well. Good luck to your site.

[TinkyWinky]

Agree with re-doing site!

We did ours and if nothing else the more professional site ensured more links and therefore went from PR5 to PR6. Keep your tags and ensure you have relevant copy and everything should (fingers crossed) be ok.
TW

[stuntdubl]

A redesign also allows you the opportunity to implement your newfound SEO skills that you have picked up from frequenting this board. Just keep your <h1>'s, titles, link text etc. the same, and make sure it is still spider friendly.

<edit>Another good rule of thumb that I had just recently learned is to link back every page to [yourdomain.com...] instead of [yourdomain...] as google sees these as two different pages. It will help to preserve the redistribution of your PR. Every little bit helps:)</edit>

[diggle]

That sounds very optimistic.
Thank you all for your advice. I am going for it.
Good luck with all your work...

[diggle]

"Another good rule of thumb that I had just recently learned is to link back every page to [yourdomain.com...] instead of [yourdomain...] as google sees these as two different pages. It will help to preserve the redistribution of your PR. Every little bit helps:)"

This sounds interesting - I don't actually do this at present - anyone else any thoughts on it?

[ncw164x]

A link to your home page [yourdomain.com...] is important, so is a link to your site map listing all the pages for your site. Your site visitors can then get to any part of your site rather than being forced down a one way street only to be forced to click on the browser back button
Example:- Home : Site Map : Contact : About
and any other links which you consider to be important

[diggle]

Thanks for that - but why is it more important to link to mydomain.com than mydomain.com/index.htm?
Would this greatly affect PR?

[lgn]

We are doing the same thing.

It was finally time to spend the bucks and get
our site redone by professionals.

We are not going to take any chances. We are going to keep our old site but rebrand our new site for use in all non-pay search engine related traffic (pay per click, top 100 sites, affiliate programs etc). Our old site will be retained for search engine traffic (primary Google)

This way we do not risk losing our search engine ranking, by having a new design.

If the new site ranks well in google after several months, we will drop the old site.

Note: Our content will be sufficiently different, that we avoid the google duplicate site content problems.

[korkus2000]

The reason to point to domain.com and not domain.com/index.htm is because Google does see these as 2 different pages. Remember that page rank is a per page ranking and not per domain. You will be raising the page rank of domain.com with internal linking while your inbound links will be raising domain.com/index.htm. I was losing 2 PR points doing this. 2 months after changing it to domain.com the PR rose 2 points with no new inbound links.

[diggle]

Korkus,

Let me get this right.
Are we talking about the links on the website itself and not inbound links from other sites?
In other words, make sure that all the pages on one's website that are linking to the home page link to domain.com - and not domain.co./index.htm - and this will, hopefully, increase PR.

[korkus2000]

Yes. Internal links count for PR. Make sure you are building up domain.com and not domain.com/index.html because the inbound links probably will.

[diggle]

thanks for that - will let you know how we go on.

[vmaster]

That's interesting. While we're at at, is it better to link internal pages to www.domain.com or www.domain.com/?

[borisbaloney]

vmaster: Use [domain.com...] because it will be quicker for your visitors.

When you link to any URL eg. www.domain.com/index.html two things happen before the visitor reaches the site. Firstly the browser recognises that www means it is the http protocol and adds the necessary text to the URL.

Secondly the sites host thinks that you are looking for a _file_ called "index.html" and looks for that first. This is good because the host will find it. If you link to a _directory_ without the slash eg. domain.com/widgets it again looks for a file because there is no trailing slash. When it doesn't find it, it looks to see if a directory exists under that name. It finds it and returns the directory's index.html file to the browser.

As I'm sure you know quick loading is essential. The extra .2 of a second may make all the difference, and helps your server load.

I'm not 100% on this but I'm pretty sure that's how it works. Anyone who knows better feel free to correct me.

[mattglet]

Yes. Internal links count for PR. Make sure you are building up domain.com and not domain.com/index.html because the inbound links probably will.-korkus2000

would this mean that you have to link to your absolute url's to link to your "homepage"? i think i'm understanding you, but not sure...

[korkus2000]

>>would this mean that you have to link to your absolute url's to link to your "homepage"?

Yes.

[mattglet]

well, i'll do this up before the update, and see how it treats me :) thanks for the info.

[korkus2000]

You should do it before the next deep crawl. The update crawl ended a few weeks back. You will also find a 2 update lag in PR.

[mattglet]

vmaster: Use [domain.com...] because it will be quicker for your visitors.

does anyone know if this matters with google?