If you’re one of those people who is constantly tinkering with their site design, you may want to rethink this practice. Each time you do a major site redesign you are quite likely to lose some ranking in the search engines, in particular, Google. Even if you’re making changes, the purpose of which would be to score better on page SEO, the end result might be that you lose rankings, link juice and more. Let’s look at a few concerns to be aware of before you tackle that redesign.

Any time you change the architecture of your site design, you run the risk of losing a lot of hard fought ground. Google likes updated and fresh content, but the paradox of this is that you may find yourself seemingly “penalized”, as your site drops in rankings and link popularity.

Many people want to update their site with flash and javascript, not understanding that Google has a hard time reading this, and it will have a negative outcome on your page’s authority. In effect, you almost need to avoid any sort of rich media while you do the redesign, which may be why you’re doing it in the first place! Crazy.

Even if you’ve done your homework and installed redirects from your old pages to the new ones, there will still be an effect. The best way to ensure there is as little bleeding as possible is to make sure your redirects are in order, and that you are doing this slowly, one page at a time. Of course, no one wants to do that. They want it looking wonderful right away. But the reality is that what you really want is to preserve your rankings as much as possible.

Ideally, any major site redesign should come early in the life of your site, before you’ve invested lots of time and money in acquiring links, a smart site architecture, and lots of good rankings.

Make sure that you do as little file renaming as you can, as this will have a negative effect on the old page, as it is no longer what you’d said it was, in Google’s eyes, and where they found it before. It may come back even stronger than before, but only time will tell. If you have need of a certain new keyword page, creating a new one is a far better idea.

If you decide to go for it, make sure that the changes you are making to your site will make it better SEO-wise, and not simply prettier. At the end of the day, if they’re not finding you, pretty doesn’t matter! Use the opportunity to better your site architecture, improve your internal linking, limit and refine the outbound links on your site, and make sure vital content on your site can be rendered by Google and Yahoo. Any other aims are secondary to staying visible and ranked!