Does site overhaul affect SEO rankings?

[opafrank]

An acquaintance working in the industry warned me that I will lose all search engine rankings if I redesign the layout of my site, even if the exact same content and the identical key words remain as is. She says search engines will consider it a brand new site and re-index from scratch, which could take months or even years. Is that true?

[elgoog]

Sometimes this happens yes, but definitely not always
maybe only in 10% of the cases
(talking about the layout change only here, if you also change the content than don't change both at the same time! That is far more dangerous)

[jctroy440]

If you change your site the first and foremost consideration is this

If you change the HTML tags on your pages, make sure when you post your new site that you add a redirect 301 file to the abandoned links and send them to the appropriate new page names on your new site. That way you will not lose the links that you have worked so hard to extablish

Google likes new content

[TheGooner]

No it's not true - there is no automatic penalty. This SEO acquantance only has a passing knowledge of what goes on deep in search engines.

However, you should consider that most search engine metrics are quite specific - they look at key words - the order and spread that they occur - and the prominance of those words. There is also attention paid to the graphical elements, the images, alt tags, title tags, and other code components like javascripts and comments.

So, this does mean that even if you retained the same visible content for a page, if you redesigned it, or produced it using CSS rather than tables then many of the metrics used by search engines would result in a different view of your page ... and hence a very probably CHANGE in rankings ... not a loss.

At a very basic level the spiders simply view the page source - and crunch the source in various ways to attempt to understand and categorise what it is that your website page is all about. So when you think of it like this - of course a redesign of content and/or page structure or layout is going to cause a change in rankings - because at a basic elemental level that page HAS changed.

Additionally, if you are redesigning a site AND if you do change your URL structure, then of course the previously stored information on previous pages by the search engines becomes valueless if those pages no longer exist. (hence the good advice provided by JCTroy above to provide redirection).

Finally, the idea the google will not quickly re-index the site, and that it could take months or years is a pretty unlikely occurance - unless your initial site was also unknown or not linked to.

Search engines exist to find URLs, to categorise them, and to display relevant content. Why on earth would they refuse to do this with new fresh content?

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Beware of much that you read regarding SEO. Much of it it regurgitated and spouted by "experts" how have only spent 2-3 years online - and all they are really experts in are "urban myths".

There is a whole parasitic industry built around gaming the search engines now - simply draining money from profitable webmasters with tales designed to create fear and uncertainly.

Much of the stories spouted online in blogs and forums simply do not make sense or stand detailed scrutiny.