Does re-designing website have negative impact on rankings?

[eazy333]

Hi guys,

I have gotten my site pretty good ranking for my local business as well as decent traffic thus far. I need to completely design my website, which i have already done. I havn't replaced the exising site yet because i'm afraid that it will drop my search engine rankings. Any input on this?
Thanks

 

[Keral_Patel]

If you are redesigning the site in such a way that the spider view of website remains more or less same then it will be all good.

If more things are changing then it depends on which things are changing.

EX: If URL structure is changing then maybe you will lose your existing indexed pages but it will appear in index with new URL's after sometime.

EX: If title is changing then there might be rankings ups and downs.

But there is no perfect answer as it depends on the situation itself.

 

[mdamin76]

Some search engine optimization is important. Do not lose them, otherwise google will start to decline your new design, thus rank it lower.

 

[SEOFocused]

unless you are doing a major restructuring, you should not have any problem. if you redesign in a way where your content gets shifted from one position to another (using left sidebar instead of previous right site bar, using sidebar navigation instead of top header navigation for example), you will see temporary flactuation in ranking but you will be able to overcome it over time. some link building will help in this situation to get back up fast