Launching Update Site Hurt Google Rank?

[nnhubbard]

I have been working on a new design, and updated site. What I am wondering is, when launching it, is it going to hurt my current Google ranking? The domain is the same, but the new site uses clean URLs, so that pages won't have the same URLs.

Any ideas on how this would effect our presence on the search engines?

Thanks.

[dtm32236]

You will see an immediate effect for a few days, but once google crawls all of your pages, everything should go back to normal. And you may see better rankings. I'd say go for it...

If you're changing URLs, I would suggest redirecting the old URLs to the new ones. That way, you'll get all previous PR juice from the pages, and you won't be flagged for duplicate content.

Google '301 redirect' if you're not sure what I'm talking about...

[nnhubbard]

You will see an immediate effect for a few days, but once google crawls all of your pages, everything should go back to normal. And you may see better rankings. I'd say go for it...

If you're changing URLs, I would suggest redirecting the old URLs to the new ones. That way, you'll get all previous PR juice from the pages, and you won't be flagged for duplicate content.

Google '301 redirect' if you're not sure what I'm talking about...

Thanks, this is just what I was needing!

[dtm32236]

No problem...

Let me point something out that I've neglected to mention:

once google crawls all of your pages, everything should go back to normal. And you may see better rankings

No matter what, when you change the URL and/or keywords on a page, your ranking will change. But that means that your rank (SERP) can go up... or it can go down.

To make sure that you're making wise changes, I would suggest checking out your pages and seeing what they rank for certain keywords. Google certain keywords and see what position your page comes up in (there's tools out there that will check SERP for you - Google 'check serp' or 'check keyword ranking') and make note of the search term and search engine ranking.

SEs can take some time to index all pages, so I would make your changes and wait a couple weeks then check your pages again for the same keywords. Now you have a record of your old ranking position and your new ones. Then you have a concrete measurement of how effective your changes have been.

I hope that made sense...