I have a website that ranks very well for it's main key phrase (top 5 ). The website really needs to be redesigned. By redesigning the website graphics and keeping the content while updating the content, will i lose page rank. My website is www.atlantic-city-online.com and key phrase is Atlantic City Hotels. Thank you to everyone that responds.

Yes redesigning a site can mess up placement - I've seen first hand a site drop out of sight for just about every organic search term that it was ranking for. You have to work pretty hard at f**kwittery though to manage such a feat, normally only big $$$ agencies can afford the level of non-skill required.

What you are describing shouldn't have any such effect though.

It depends. If you change the content of your site during the redesign, you probably will lose placement, at least for a while. If the changes are purely aesthetic, then your placement shouldn't be affected.

So basically, If i keep the content and change out the graphics while keeping the same files names for the replaced graphics should not hurt my placement? Is that correct?

Originally Posted by rickster

So basically, If i keep the content and change out the graphics while keeping the same files names for the replaced graphics should not hurt my placement? Is that correct?

Yes that's correct. I couldn't guarantee that your placement would remain exactly the same, but theoretically it shouldn't change at all due to this - search engines can't see images etc. so if the changes were only aesthetic, then it wouldn't affect your rankings. Alt tags would probably be changed if you were using different images so you might see rankings changed very slightly (in Google images at least), but otherwise your rankings would stay the same.

The main thing is don't change your URLs.

Well, layout could impact it beyond alt tags. From my understanding Google does try to rate the importance of keywords based on where they are at in your page. ie... if it's in large bold letters at the top of your page, it'll be more important than small text near the bottom. This is what I hear, and it makes a little bit of sense. Overall I'd expect this to have a very very small effect though, and you probably won't notice a change. If your redsign will make your site better, that will increase your traffic and possibly organic back links. Both of those are much more important than anything.

Well, layout could impact it beyond alt tags

http://www.webmaster-talk.com/seo-ta...nd-values.html

From my understanding Google does try to rate the importance of keywords based on where they are at in your page. ie... if it's in large bold letters at the top of your page, it'll be more important than small text near the bottom

Nope!

Interesting that I should see this today considering an email I got this morning.

One of our practices has a web site that was built by a 3rd party firm, and they paid a LOT of money for it. They are also paying thru the nose for maintenance. The site is built using Cold Fusion for content management only, so the page have a .cfm extension on them.

We've been asked to take over the site, but we cannot support Cold Fusion (against company IT standards). We will NOT be redesigning the site, it's actually done very well and is coded to web standards. We won't be changing the content except for the few changes that the practice wants to make. We're not changing page titles, headings or anything else. We will changing CFM pages back to HTM pages. The domain name will not change, just a change in ownership and dns services.

Well, here's the thing brought up in this email - the guy who's the contact at the company that built the site emailed the doctor who hired them and told him that we told him we were going to redesign the site (wrong !). Then he goes on to say that some of their pages have very high page rank and if we redesign the site the site's rankings will disappear !

Sounds like typical blabber from 'seo experts' , and this company clearly doesn't want to lose a cash cow, so he's trying to blow things out of proportion to keep from losing it to us.

My reply to this concern was that their site is well established, has excellent content, and they had little to worry about, that the file name was NOT the key factor at all. IF their rankings dip, they will recover as long as they keep their site updated.

changing the file extensions will loose any SE traffic totally and whatever PR they have for anything up to 6 months with permanent redirects. Without, it may never recover at all.

Configure the server to parse .cfm pages as whatever code your server supports, then you can keep the file names and extensions intact. There will be no loss of PR (real or useless toolbar), direct traffic will NOT be affected and SE rankings & traffic will only change if the page content changes.
A win win situation.

I don't know that we can do that Chris, we have to use .net or nothing, company IT standard. We are stuck with Windows Servers & IIS, no way around it. It would probably be a lot of work to use .net JUST to parse out CFM code. I don't know enough about it to have a clue how we'd go about that in our environment. We would certainly set up re-directs, that just makes sense.

It would probably be a lot of work to use .net JUST to parse out CFM code.

Not at all, it's very simple (IIS being my thing though ) http://www.candsdesign.co.uk/article...tion-mappings/

and to parse .cfm through the .net compiler the executable needs to be one of the .NET Framework DLLs.

Thanks Chris, I'll show this to our .net guy. Our sever is set up for ASP 2.0, but that's as far as my knowledge of it goes. We have a limited amount of control over our web server thanks to IT controls

IT loves taking that sort of control away from developers. It's worth setting up one way or another, though. Chris's method is preferred; a config change telling the server to treat cfm files as if they were aspx. You can use an HttpHandler to do basically the same thing, but as a code change instead of config.

Doing same thing, and had same question as original poster.
The content is similar, there's more content and fewer pages. And the redesign has better information architecture. Gonna roll the dice and see if the site still ranks top 6 for quite a few search phrases. Upload happening mid week.
Here goes nothing...