Major Makeover

How dangerous?

[Widestrides]

I'm planning a major makeover of my site, which is well established and in the top 5 of Google SERPS. What should I be careful of?

I may change servers. Is that dangerous?

I may do a complete change of every page all at once. Is that dangerous?

I'm keeping title, description and kw metatags the same, as well as kw density, alt tags, etc. But the content has been completely re-written.

We also went to a cleaner, simpler home page with less text. Is this dangerous? The content is still there in the site, just less on the home page for the cleaner look.

Should I do this whole thing slower, and page by page to appease the SE gods?

We will also keep many of our old pages alive, so in effect we will be adding content.

Any other suggestiong or pitfalls to avoid?

Thanks.

[sem4u]

>I may change servers. Is that dangerous?

It should be ok as long as the site is up on both servers while the DNS changes are made.

>I may do a complete change of every page all at once. Is that dangerous?

It depends what you are changing on the pages.

>We also went to a cleaner, simpler home page with less text. Is this dangerous? The content is still there in the site, just less on the home page for the cleaner look.

Is your home page already ranking for good phrases? If so you may want to leave as much text on there as possible.

[ken_b]

Are you keeping the same file names for each page?

[uk_webber]

If its not broken....

[mosaic service]

I may change servers. Is that dangerous?

->>No it is not dangerous. Just make sure your website is not offline while you are doin' the shiftin' of your site.

I may do a complete change of every page all at once. Is that dangerous?

->>You can make changes to your webpages as long as you do not change the file names...for in this case you would loose your PR for that page.

I'm keeping title, description and kw metatags the same, as well as kw density, alt tags, etc. But the content has been completely re-written.

->> This is a good opportunity for you to make a good effect to your content. Try ot use as many forms of your keyword as possible in your content, instead of using the same keyword again n again.

We also went to a cleaner, simpler home page with less text. Is this dangerous? The content is still there in the site, just less on the home page for the cleaner look.

->>Content on the home page is important. So, try to use killer content for your home page. Use your words effectively.

Should I do this whole thing slower, and page by page to appease the SE gods?

->>This would be a good idea to do the changes slowly rather then in one go.!

[Block19Row13]

i look after a web site for a company and we had no option but to change everything.

i worked for the company that provided ecommerce to the company i now work for, they booted me out, shut our site down and i had one month to start from scratch.

we now have search engines results we could only have dreamed of 8 months ago.

[hulahoop]

yeah...I'm wanting to change quite a bit of my site.
Would changing the density of the words really affect the site's ranking on google?

How many pages should I change within a day, a week or more?

[zulu_dude]

I've got a similar query... I'm about to redo a site for a client and want to totally gut the current site, as it's absolutely horrible. It does rank second in Google for an amazing keyphrase though, so I don't want to jeopardise that position.

If I keep the same content (on the homepage at least), and just change the layout completely, change menus, etc, will that affect Google's view of the page?

Taking into account the advice already given, are there any other tips that anyone can give for redoing a site?