Hi,

Does anybody know if redesigning a site would affect search engine placement. We have a potential customer who currently has a very high web presence and doesn’t want this to be affected by a new site. He currently has html pages, so I imagine redesigning these, naming them the same and uploading them to the same place would made absolutely no difference – but, would there be a difference if the site is moved to another host and also if the pages are changed to be asp or the whole thing is database driven?

Thanks if anyone can help.

As long as the page locations and displayed content remain the same, it will not affect the SEO ranking.

thats what 301's are for.

IIS supports them, as does apache.

Changing the backend of a website wont change anything, provided that the front end is still the same as it was before (as much as possible)

If the files change from .html to .asp, you will have problems unless you use 301 redirects for all the old filenames.

However, there are ways to keep the .html extensions and still have them be database-driven, ASP or otherwise.

changing from .html to .asp will cause a problem but there are ways around it. you can tell the web server to parse .html for ASP (or other programming language) code. as mentioned about, you can also do a 301 redirect so that those looking for the old URLs are forwarded to a new page.

So long as your web addresses stay the same OR are forwarded to the new address, any changes you do in technology will not affect your ranking. What we output and send to the client is the client-side code (HTML/CSS/etc) - all the server-side code (asp, php, jsp, etc) is processed on the server before being sent to the client.

I'm not an SEO expert but the 301 redirect may/may not affect your rankings and would advise the simplest solution of keeping them .html but tell the server to parse them for ASP code.