Gary Illyes, Google’s analyst, has recently shared some insights on how website redesign can affect search engine optimization. While addressing the questions Gary received through direct messages on LinkedIn, the analyst decided to share the responses publicly to guide others as well.
Any advice coming straight from Google employees is valued by everyone. Gary is not very active on social media sites, unlike other employees, including John Mueller and Martin Splitt.
While sharing the impact of website redesigns on SEO, Gary posted that such changes can affect the ranking of websites on Google searches. He explained that the impact is due to the use of HTML by Google to understand what the website has to offer in order to decide which category it should go in.
If the website developer makes adjustments to the basic HTML frame, like splitting paragraphs, replacing H tags with CSS, or using breaking tags where they are not required, the overall ranking of the website will be affected. To prevent ranking from going down, Gary advised sticking with the HTML framework while remodeling the website and excluding breaking tags from unnecessary places. In short, Gary suggests that if users decide to completely change the website, they should at least try to keep the base similar.
PixemWeb owner Joel Rivera, while answering a question on Quora, said that redesigning can have three kinds of impacts on website ranking. The first is the undesirable effect, in which the ranking will fall. The second effect is when the redesign doesn’t include any major changes to the HTML and the basic structure remains almost the same. As a result, ranking neither goes up nor down. The third effect is the most desirable one: redesigning to ensure that a website follows best practices perfectly can bring up the website on a Google search.
Redesigning effect on ranking is not the only valuable piece of information shared by Gary with his audience; he even guided users about the size of large robot files. He added that if the size of the robot.txt file is over five hundred kilobytes, then it needs proper attention. Furthermore, proper use of "rel canonical" tags was also discussed by Gary on the forum.
Read next: Most SEOs won’t recommend using AI to write their content
Any advice coming straight from Google employees is valued by everyone. Gary is not very active on social media sites, unlike other employees, including John Mueller and Martin Splitt.
While sharing the impact of website redesigns on SEO, Gary posted that such changes can affect the ranking of websites on Google searches. He explained that the impact is due to the use of HTML by Google to understand what the website has to offer in order to decide which category it should go in.
If the website developer makes adjustments to the basic HTML frame, like splitting paragraphs, replacing H tags with CSS, or using breaking tags where they are not required, the overall ranking of the website will be affected. To prevent ranking from going down, Gary advised sticking with the HTML framework while remodeling the website and excluding breaking tags from unnecessary places. In short, Gary suggests that if users decide to completely change the website, they should at least try to keep the base similar.
PixemWeb owner Joel Rivera, while answering a question on Quora, said that redesigning can have three kinds of impacts on website ranking. The first is the undesirable effect, in which the ranking will fall. The second effect is when the redesign doesn’t include any major changes to the HTML and the basic structure remains almost the same. As a result, ranking neither goes up nor down. The third effect is the most desirable one: redesigning to ensure that a website follows best practices perfectly can bring up the website on a Google search.
Redesigning effect on ranking is not the only valuable piece of information shared by Gary with his audience; he even guided users about the size of large robot files. He added that if the size of the robot.txt file is over five hundred kilobytes, then it needs proper attention. Furthermore, proper use of "rel canonical" tags was also discussed by Gary on the forum.
Read next: Most SEOs won’t recommend using AI to write their content
