[Maxine]

Hi everyone

I want to change my website from a publisher one to a dreamweaver one (about time I you all cry!)

Anyhow... this is my dilemma...

The site that I have now www.float.ltd.uk is very poor design wise and there is a drastically edited publisher version ready to be published. Somehow (dont ask me how) I have managed to get fairly good rankings for this with plastering huntingdon and ok rankings for plumbing huntingdon.

What I dont want to do is throw the baby out with the bathwater when I change to a dreamweaver site but feel unsure what will happen in terms of rankings if I just publish this to the existing domain.

Would you recommend me having a separate domain to publish the new dreamweaver site to and build up separate rankings there and then phase out the old one or how would you all recommend that I cut over without losing rankings?

Thanks everyone

[LinkingClever]

A couple of points to consider;
The important thing in search engines eyes is the url, so keep it exactly the same, or 301 redirect the old to the new. And keep the onsite stuff - title, meta desc, content etc the same also. Google dosen't 'look' at the design, so as long as these elements remain, you should be fine. Have a look also at the file names of the images used in your design, and try to keep them also.

I would say though, wait for a few of the others to comment, as this is a big move. My experience in this is on a page by page basis, only a few on a site, not an entire site change, so hang on for some more input!

Good luck, hope it goes smoothly!
Jay

[RedEvo]

Personally I wouldn't sweat too much about this as there are very few pages in the Google index optimised for these phrases.

Let's take a look.......

plastering huntingdon
You are No.1 in the Local Business listing - that's not going to change IMHO
You are No.5 in the organic listings and this is for your homepage, the URL of this won't change when you update the site. Changing the title tag and meta desc won't harm this either although what you have is fine. Also, if you want to be No.1 for this phrase add it to the homepage's title tag, there are no pages in the Google index with this phrase in their title tag. No.1 position might be yours for the taking

plumbing huntingdon
No.2 in the local business listing
Page 3 position 5 in the organics.
Again, page one and possibly position 1 is up for grabs here if you optimise correctly and I wouldn't worry too much about that page 3 position 5 as there are no UK pages optimised for this phrase, it's yours for the taking

One thing to research. Are these phrases generating visits AND business?

Hope this helps.

d

[Indizine]

I siginificantly changed the design on one of my sites, and although it then dropped one place in PR, it didint affect it in the SERPS at all, which is what matters. As said above, just ensure you keep roughly the same page content, keywords, etc.