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Here's a question from Richard in New York who asks I'm
changing the platform of my blog.
All old URLs will redirect to new ones.
But since the HTML code and layout of the pages are
different, do you lose search engine rankings?
Well, search engine rankings can change when the page
changes itself.
If you're doing the 301's correctly, so a permanent
redirect from the old site to the new site.
And if you're doing at a page level, so from the old page to
the new page.
You should be in relatively good shape.
But it's not just incoming links.
It's also the content of the page itself.
So if you had a really good layout with a really clean
design where all the text was easily indexed.
And you move to something that was a lot more confusing and
maybe the text wasn't as easy for us to extract, that could
change your search rankings for the down
side or for the negative.
In general, we're relatively good about changing layouts
and being able to still be able to discern what
that page is about.
But here's one test that you could do.
As long as you haven't done the transition yourself, if
you can try to make a few tests where you can take the
layout of a new page or the new site and see if you can
apply it in some very simple ways to the old site, then
that's the way to isolate those.
Because it's just like any scientific experiment.
If you do two things at once and your rankings go down, you
can't decouple what caused it.
Whereas if you can change just the layout, even if it's only
on a few pages, to sort of try out and see whether your
rankings change with that, then you'll know OK, was it
more likely to be because of the redirects or because I was
changing my HTML layout.
So that's just a little piece of advice if you want to make
sure that things go a little more smoothly.
It's always nice if you can test it, sort of put your toe
in the water, before you jump in and do a
cannon ball first thing.