Change from Table Based to DIV based
-
Hello,
I am about to change my sitewide template from a table based one to a div based one. I am obviously worried about losing ranking and optimistic it hopefully may improve rankings.
Any thoughts/experience on this? I have done my best to keep all content, tags (H, alt, title, etc) the same but figured I would see if anybody had any good tips/suggestions?
Thanks!
-
In theory a change from tables to divs should not affect anything if its simply a layout/styling change. But if you inadvertently changed something else, thats where you might run into trouble. I would just double check everything else is as before; indexation, URLs, internal anchor text, titles, descriptions etc.
Three things I would do;
1. You have it on a test server now? Crawl the live site and new site with Screaming Frog or Xenu Link sleuth and see if both crawls return the same thing for titles, descriptions, headers etc.
2. View both the new and old site with CSS/Java turned off and set user-agent to Google Bot (there's a plug in for firefox to do this) and see if you can see all the content.
3. Finally, you can run the broken link checker plug in for Chrome on the new site, and make sure all your links work.
After launch of the new site, I would immediately also check webmaster tools for any errors.
-Dan
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Change of URL + SEO Impact
We recently changed the URLs from our site http://www.website.com (old)
On-Page Optimization | | ederdesign
https://website.com/us/en/ (new) Our ranking is plummeting every since and I wonder if the new URL had something to do with it. Do you know if that change, could have impacted the ranking?0 -
After HTTPS upgrade, should I change all internal links, or a general 301 redirect is better?
I recently upgraded to https. Of course most internal links of my old posts are still http. So I set up a 301 redirect in order to make the old link works. In terms od SEO this is good or it is better to update all the internal links to https, manually? In that case can I do it in batch with a search/replace command in the phmyadmin database? any other suggested method? thank you
On-Page Optimization | | micvitale0 -
On Page Optimization not updating after SSL change
Last week we changed our URLs to be only HTTPS (they were a mixture of both for a couple of weeks). We did this by adding a 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS. However, the On Page Optimization is now showing the same URL/Keyword twice for a few of our pages. One has a grade A, one has a grade B. The grade B complains about "Rel Canonical" not matching, but the other doesn't. This is pretty confusing - should it not have crawled the pages and noticed the 301 redirects and combined the entries or removed the HTTP ones?
On-Page Optimization | | RitchieF19800 -
Changing Location & Losing Location Based Keywords
We're a web agency, and we've just moved from Bromley to Sevenoaks. Our website ranks really well for all Bromley led keywords and regularly brings enquiries, but we're no longer based in Bromley. We don't want to lose our rankings, but clearly we can't claim to be based in Bromley when we are now in Sevenoaks. Obviously, we also need to start using Sevenoaks to build up traction for searches in our new area. So the question is - should we create a Bromley or Sevenoaks focused landing page (or both)? Should we change all references of Bromley to Sevenoaks across the site in one go or gradually? Would it be terrible to leave Bromley onsite? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Ecce0 -
Prevent Indexing of URLs Based on Tags
I started my website as a blog over at Posterous, but decided to turn it into a full scale business website with a self-hosted WordPress theme. Shortly after transitioning from Posterous to WordPress, I noticed that Google was indexing not only my old blog posts, but the URLs of my blog posts based on the tags they have. Is there any reason why this is a problem? I'm sure it shouldn't qualify as duplicate content, but for some reason it just feels a bit sloppy to me to have all of these pages indexed...Is this a non-issue? Should I just be more discriminating with my use of 'tags' if it bothers me? JiGLH.png
On-Page Optimization | | williammarlow0 -
Changing an Aged Category Name
I am interested in potentially changing a category name on our site, WirelessEmporium.com. This section has been called "Covers & Faceplates" for the better part of the decade. However, changing search trends, PPC data and search volume analysis have indicated that our preferable KW combo may be "Cases & Covers" instead. What are the potentially ramifications of making the switch now? We have a significant amount of age, link juice, etc built up toward our "Covers & Faceplates" section at the moment and all of their relevant URLs. A change would involve 301 redirects, rewriting of URLs, rewriting of all tags, img alt tags, etc.
On-Page Optimization | | eugeneku0 -
Is it worth changing urls with underscores?
A few pages on one of my sites have underscores linking keywords rather than hyphens (keywords_and_keyword rather than keyword-and-keyword). Possibly from a time before I knew hyphens were preferred... One of the pages ranks well, and drives a good amount of traffic. The others do not do so well, but are still within the top 10 landing pages for the site. Is it worth me changing the underscores to hyphens (setting up 301 redirects first of course) or doesn't it make that much difference?
On-Page Optimization | | Jingo010 -
Not making a change of the 100's in crawl Diagnostic
Based on the PRO crawl Diagnostics – if we don’t make a change on 1 page, does that just affect the SEO on that one page, or does it affect the SEO on all pages of the site? E.g. If we get a “Too many on page links” for a certain page that we don’t really want to rank for – does not fixing that particlaur page affect the site as a whole? Hope I explained this ok..
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0