Gary Illyes from the Google Search Relations staff posted one other PSA on LinkedIn. This time he mentioned, “once you redesign a web site, its rankings in serps might go nuts.”
Sure, that is in all probability tremendous apparent to most of you studying this web site however Gary dives a bit deeper.
He mentioned, “Amongst different issues, serps use the HTML of your pages to make sense of the content material. If for instance you break up paragraphs, take away H tags in favor of CSS styling, or add breaking tags (very true for CJK languages), you modify the HTML parsers’ output, which in flip might change the positioning’s rankings.”
Briefly, when redesigning, positive – go forward – make the positioning fairly. However altering the core HTML may end up in rating modifications.
Gary recommends, “attempt to use semantically comparable HTML once you redesign the positioning and keep away from including tags the place you do not really want them.”
So in the event you can change the design however on the similar time preserve issues within the HTML trying comparable, that’s your greatest guess. Change so much with out altering so much – if that is sensible.
Discussion board dialogue at LinkedIn.