relaunch of site affect google site position?

[Suze]

Hi everyone - sorry but this is an urgent one. I rang actinic support and they suggested the forum as they didn't really have much advice for me.

We are upgrading now from actinic 7 to 8 and the site is basically the same but with a new look. The page titles are similar but not all the same and the meta and keywords are the same. We were hoping to launch the site tomorrow on actinic 8 but are worried that the site will slip down google and my boss is very concerned.

I know it takes a while for the spiders to index a site. Can anyone advise please? Thanks.

The site is here for review but ordering suspended and the links are denservus instead of dentalshop:

http://www.denservus.co.uk/

[Mike Hughes]

As long as the page filenames are the same and the content still relevant (perhaps more relevant as hopefully anything you've changed will be for the better) then I wouldn't expect there to be too much of an impact.

I suspect the most likely impact will be:

1. A short term boost in rankings as google finds the 'fresh' content.

2. A drop back to where you were before as it doesn't sound like there's anything significantly different to the pages or site.

Tell your boss there are no guarantees in life but unless you're prepared to move things forward the future is stagnation and gradual decline.

Mike

[cheaptents]

Basically Mike is spot on, after years of neglect if you update a website it will boost rankings a tiny bit but likely not for long... basically unless you've really added value and optimise well off-site as well with a new site you will end up where you were - a redesign should be about more than a design it should be about re-energising content. url's aren't an amazingly important factor they are helpful yes but there are many sites with ugly urls that rank well. Basically content is king.

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the vote of confidence.

I checked out your site in IE8 and after a very slow loading page I got a javascript error.

The page then displayed but there were no images in your rotating image box. It might be something you want to look into.

Mike

PS. I would have contacted you on this via PM but you seem to have it disabled.