Making Changes to Your Website

It’s natural to always want to make changes to improve your site, but you should be aware that some changes can impact your ratings and be careful about them as you move forward.

What types of changes will impact your website?  If you start making changes to site content, or structure, will that make a difference?  In short, making changes in the site’s structure, or changing around the content of the site too often, can and will impact the site’s ranking. Since every change you make prompts Google to reassess your ranking, a large number of re-rankings may come back to impact you negatively.

When building  your site and first getting it indexed, this is a actually a very good thing.  Google stores a copy of your website on its server. Whenever there is a change in the structure, content or any other aspect of the site, Google will swiftly detect the change and make corrections to your site‘s ranking as necessary.

As soon as changes are seen, Google will recalculate your ranking based on the new pages it has indexed. If they like the changes, your ranking may very well go up. Conversely, if they feel you diminished the value of your site,  you may see your ranking go down. Expecting nothing at all to happen is naïve. There will usually be some ramification of any change. Your job is to ensure all changes make a positive difference.

Making changes to the structure of your website and significantly reducing the amount of content are both factors that can quickly change ranking. Switching to flash pages, leaving little actual textual content, is often a problem that will quickly tank site rankings ass well.

If you have added more content that is not optimized, you have lost some of your keyword density and therefore also created a scenario where your ratings will drop. By the same token, if you fiddle around with you web design, frequently make changes and shift around the structure of your links on a regular basis, you  could harm your web rankings. Actually, it is a near certainty you will – at a minimum in the short run.

It goes without saying that not all change is negative! If you have made changes to the text and structure of your web page that improves them, you should see a corresponding  improvement in your site ranking. What it all boils down to is how much care you take in making the changes, and that you make them for the right reasons and not for the sake of change alone.

When you make changes to your website, remember that Google indexing happens regularly. Depending on the interval of time between your improvements, changes can be reflected quickly or slowly. If your site is indexed once each month, try to make changes in batches. By doing that,  the changes all fall before the indexing and will be reflected in one fell swoop.

If you keep making changes in fits and starts, it will make your site look erratic and will end up harming your ranking moreso than anything else. Make a concerted effort to keep original content and site structure intact as much as possible. Even popular news sites have a set pattern of displaying data. You will often notice that only their content changes on a daily basis. They know to control variables and do so to their best advantage.