Making Changes to Your Site

Every webmaster wants to do whatever they can to make their site better, it’s only natural to feel that way. Webmasters have to be aware however that there are some changes that may not always be for the better so they can avoid them and not have the opposite effect of what they desire. So, what is it exactly will impact your website if you start making changes to site content, or structure?  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. Because of that, caution and moderation are often warranted.

Once you have built your site and it is indexed, this is a good thing. It is exactly what every webmaster wants and needs to be successful. Google stores a copy of your website on its server; and whenever there is a change in the structure, content or any other aspect of the site, Google will swiftly detect the change. This is important to remember so take note of it.

As soon as changes begin to appear on their radar, Google will recalculate your ranking based on the new pages it has indexed. If they like the changes, your ranking might go up; if they feel you diminished the value of your site, it might go down. Expecting nothing at all to happen is naive, though – there will usually be some ramification for whatever changes you have made. What you need to do is make changes that will reflect positively far more than negatively, and therin lies the great debate of what constitutes improvement.

If you change the structure of your website sand significantly reduce the amount of content, or switch to flash pages so there is very little text content left, you may be in trouble. Google is not a big fan of Flash because spiders cannot crawl it. Real text should be predominate on each page.

Likewise, if you have added more content that is not optimized, you have effectively dragged down the overall keyword density of your content which is problematic. In the same vein, if you tamper with you web design, frequently make changes and shift around the structure of your links on a regular basis, you may also harm your web rankings. A little change now and then can be a good thing – constant tinkering rarely if ever is.

Also, when you make a change to your website, remember that Google indexing happens regularly so there is little chance of sliding by between rankings with massive changes and no impact. If your site is indexed once a month, you should try to make changes in batches, so the changes all fall before the indexing and will be reflected in a fell swoop. Don’t ignore how much that can change everything.

If you keep making changes in fits and starts, it will make your site look erratic and will end up harming your ranking more than anything else. Attempt to keep original content and site structure intact. Even popular news sites have a set pattern of displaying data; you’ll notice that only their content changes on a daily basis. They know to control variables. When overhauling  your website, keep this in mind – plan ahead to get all changes done before the next indexing, and ensure that all changes come off as genuine improvements to get better rankings. If you do that, you have the best odds of seeing a positive change.