Change in design affect ranking

May 10th, 2009, 12:25 pm

Does change in design affect ranking of the website? Is it have positive effect or a negative one?

May 11th, 2009, 12:05 pm

Yes, especially if you change things like titles, H1s, etc. Positive or negative - depends on what you did!

May 11th, 2009, 9:44 pm

It does matter. Your site have many things like navigation, content and sitemap. They all matters @ search engines like Google.

[joebert]

May 11th, 2009, 10:19 pm

Strictly speaking "design" has absolutely no effect at all on search engine ranking since "design" is strictly visual.

"design implementation", AKA the underlying HTML code which is used to display the design on the other hand, has the biggest weight of anything used to calculate rankings.

As an old example, CSS Zen Garden has shown, you can completely change the "design" of the site without altering the HTML at all.

Now, if you were to do something like go through and replace every single one of the following tags on your site,

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<h1>...</h1>

With the following code,

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<span style="font-size:2em;">...</span>

It would have a negative effect on your rankings.

However if you made that replacement in the oppisite direction, it may have a positive effect on ranking, assuming you have not gone overboard with it and there's a reasonable number of <h1> elements on the page.

May 12th, 2009, 1:05 am

Changes and updates are helpful in achieving rankings through keywords in search engine result pages. Change in Design works when it follow the promotional guidelines and the main thing is text part on the website page.

May 13th, 2009, 2:20 am

I don't think it does affect ranking. Design is only meant for human visitors and not bots. When robots crawl your site, they can't read design so changing it has an impact.

May 23rd, 2009, 11:26 am

Sometimes changing a lot of the tags and on page elements might affect the rankings of the sites for a short while but the rankings should return to normal if you have done the SEO things correctly.

June 16th, 2009, 3:31 am

Changes in your site may affect your rankings, but i don't think so if you change your design..For me there will be no changes in your rankings..Spiders can't see your website's design only the content of your website..

June 16th, 2009, 5:08 am

Totally agree with joe, and this is an important reason why any visual aspect of a webpage should go into CSS and HTML should contain just the page content. This way, search engines always see the page in the same way, and if you want to change the page's looks, all you need to change is the CSS.

June 16th, 2009, 9:42 am

yeah I agree with responses here. Design is just visual, for visitors.

June 24th, 2009, 1:01 am

Your content change maybe affect the rank as title content so so.

June 29th, 2009, 12:30 am

I redesigned an entire site about a year ago, and my first page, first position spot didnt move within Google.

I would however, be mindful of the extent of changes, as mine still retained *some* of the original SEO.

John

July 1st, 2009, 2:45 am

If you are changing the design of the site like color or templates then I don't think it affects in ranking.

But if you are changing the h1 tag, title etc then there is affect in ranking. if you are choosing relevant and proper tagetted keywords, good title then you can find your ranking goes up

July 10th, 2009, 9:15 pm

Definitely, changing the contents or just the graphics on the site does not effect the rankings at all. But when you change the meta information, structure or navigation of your site, search engines take a step back and throw the site couple of ranks behind. That's why it's always a good idea not to touch the optimization of your website very frequently.

July 14th, 2009, 2:03 pm

A minor design changes to pure design (i.e., CSS) should not have any ranking impact at all. Minor site maintenance shouldn't make much difference however, if you make changes to your site template you can expect Google to drop some pages temporarily.