will redoing a website hurt your page rank on Google?

[MrBrightside]

My client wants me to add some pizazz to his website, or offer any advice I can, so I took a look and this is what he has now:

http://www.youridahoattorney.com/

Well I wanted to redo the entire website something like this:

http://img2.pict.com/2d/3d/86/1596542/0/800/rockieswebsitemockupv1.jpg

but he’s afraid that if he changes his site it will hurt his Google page rank, which (IMHO) isn’t that good, he get’s around 500hits per month. But Either way he doesn’t want to "rebuild his page ranking"

Would Google knock down his ranking if you totally redid the site?

he also wonders if putting up a second site that’s beautiful and slowly switching over "would having two websites hurt the page rank"?

Is his fear real? or irrational? I’m not sure.

[Matt]

Just change it. As long as you have all the safeguards in place (i.e. accessibility) then you shouldn’t have an issue, in fact, it may raise his page rank. I like to think of Google robots as an old blind, deaf man that relies on a braille reader to communicate. A trend I see is highly accessible websites ranking higher than non-accessible websites. Popularity will still play the biggest role.

[MrBrightside]

so even if I totally change his website from website tonight crap to wordpress as long as I have good SEO it shouldn’t cause a dip at all even a little bit. because that’s what he’s worried about.

I do write very clean code and I would use meta tags properly (probalby throw in the SEO plugin)

[TheDoc]

It depends on what you mean by "redoing" the website.

You can completely redesign a website and have the Google rank stay the exact same if you don’t change the content.

If you change the content, however, there of course is a chance the Google rank will change.

[TheDoc]

"ikthius" wrote:

but as I see it having up to date content is a must, especially for a lawyer, so he should not be relying on this part to keep his rank high. (just my 2 cents dude)

I completely agree. There’s no point in keeping stale, uninformative content. I’m merely pointing out the fact that if the content changes, site wide, then there is a chance for a drop in ranking.

[MrBrightside]

The content will probably stay the same or will be added too BUT, the structure of the website would most likely be tottaly different.

Like the navigation would be different, probably using sub pages to break up the 10+ links there now.

The other idea is to open up a totally different site, then slowly try to transition when the Google ranks pick up. which is a pretty good option, but it also seems somewhat needless. but again there’s fear, he’s also worried that Google will think the Repetition two websites about the same thing, will put the rank down on both pages, is this a real fear?

[TheDoc]

Having said that, there is absolutely no way to guarantee a consistent page rank. Google does its own thing. It is impossible to promise anything. If anyone has told him otherwise, he’s been misinformed.

[Matt]

Remember when I said "Google robots as an old blind, deaf man that relies on a Braille reader to communicate"? Here’s a more correct version:

"Google robots as an old blind, deaf man that relies on a Braille reader to communicate and features ultimate organized randomness."

Other than the people that work for Google, I don’t think many people really understand how Google ranks pages. There’s the meta and popularity aspects, which control 90% of the ranking, but there’s another 10% that nobody (by "nobody", I mean people I’ve seen or met) really understands.

[MrBrightside]

Thanks your replies have been really helpful :D .

I still don’t know if I can convince him, but I’m not going to push him too hard, I’ll just give him what he wants.
Perhaps go with the 2nd idea of setting up an alternate website.

thanks again,
-Mr.B

[AshtonSanders]

Just some quick notes:

Page rank is only one aspect of what google thinks about your site. It actually is an algorithm that calculates incoming links versus outgoing links. more info on wiki.

So, in theory your pagerank won’t change from a redesign unless you increase the number of outgoing links.

Also note, the public PR that you see in your browser only gets updated every 6 months or so, and is usually a month or two behind when it does get updated.

My biggest recommendation for redoing the site is to make sure you 301 redirect all the old pages to the corresponding new pages (or keep the page names the same).

From my experience, there’s always going to be a small dip in your SE rankings after a complete redo.

[TheDoc]

"MrBrightside" wrote:

Perhaps go with the 2nd idea of setting up an alternate website.

I’d be careful with that. Still seems like trying to cheat the Google system.

From a recent post on NETTUTS:

"Google is very strict about duplicate content and severely penalizes sites which do so. This is regardless of whether the content is on different domains. If the same, exact content appears on different pages, the page last indexed is going to be penalized."

[Matt]

"TheDoc" wrote:

"MrBrightside" wrote:

Perhaps go with the 2nd idea of setting up an alternate website.

I’d be careful with that. Still seems like trying to cheat the Google system.

From a recent post on NETTUTS:

"Google is very strict about duplicate content and severely penalizes sites which do so. This is regardless of whether the content is on different domains. If the same, exact content appears on different pages, the page last indexed is going to be penalized."

Aye, you’ll most likely have to apply for reconsideration. Even then, it’s a 6 month wait.

[Author]

Posts