Does a new website negatively effect search engine rankings?

[dogmom327]

This might be a silly questions but how do I switch (major upgrades) my website to new software while maintaining all my search engine rankings? Do I need to manually redirect each current page to the new page? Will that hurt anything? I'm finally getting some nice rankings going on and I don't want to lose that status.

[CawMama]

Great question....this is something that is on my mind also. I think a 301 redirect will take care of it, but I have no idea how to do that.

[dogmom327]

Originally Posted by Carrin

Great question....this is something that is on my mind also. I think a 301 redirect will take care of it, but I have no idea how to do that.

I'll ask my BIL if he knows how to do a 301 redirect. He should know what to do.

[Mama Dragon]

Major changes will kill your rankings for a short time. If your new pages are equally as good, or better, it'll 4-8 weeks for your pages to get high rankings again, but they usually will place about where they were previously. Totally new pages may take longer, or may not, it's a bit of a mystery and every expert seems to say something different. Does your host offer 301 redirects? Mine makes it as easy as logging into my cPanel, creating a new redirect and inputing the old and new urls.

[dogmom327]

Thanks for the info! The thought of loosing our rankings makes me ill but at least I can do the redirects and know its probably coming. At this point, the text and meta tags should be basically the same (with some small improvements), its more the look of the site, organization, amount of info available (more!) and ultimately the shopping cart software which has to change for the sake of my sanity.