Changing Wordpress theme page
-
I hear that when moving your posts from one website to another, if it is done incorrectly it can hurt your ranking on search engines.
With this mind. Does changing from on theme to another affect a websites ranking?
-
Hi There
If you wouldn't mind, could we define "moving" a little more specifically? Which of these are true for what you need to do?
- You're moving to a different host - Y/N
- Your domain name is changing - Y/N
- You are changing your URLs on purpose - Y/N
- You're changing to a new theme - Y/N
Hope you don't mind the little Y/N game
If you can answer those, then I can help guide you as far as how to do it safelyThanks!
-Dan
-
Moving to a different URL. Thanks alot!
-
What guide do you use to help move websites in the correct way?
-
Yes switching theme means switching the HTML that the crawlers see on the page but "affect" does not necessarily mean negative effect. I believe all the good designers these days do semantic HTML which is crawled better and gets better results in terms of SEO.
So in answer to your question, everything else (content and URLs) remaining the same, the switch in theme can affect and also improve your rankings if done right.
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
-
Will redirecting a logged in user from a public page to an equivalent private page (not visible to google) impact SEO?
Hi, We have public pages that can obviously be visited by our registered members. When they visit these public pages + they are logged in to our site, we want to redirect them to the equivalent (richer) page on the private site e.g. a logged in user visiting /public/contentA will be redirected to /private/contentA Note: Our /public pages are indexed by Google whereas /private pages are excluded. a) will this affect our SEO? b) if not, is 302 the best http status code to use? Cheers
Technical SEO | | bernienabo0 -
What should I do with all these 404 pages?
I have a website that Im currently working on that has been fairly dormant for a while and has just been given a face lift and brought back to life. I have some questions below about dealing with 404 pages. In Google WMT/search console there are reports of thousands of 404 pages going back some years. It says there are over 5k in total but I am only able to download 1k or so from WMT it seems. I ran a crawl test with Moz and the report it sent back only had a few hundred 404s in, why is that? Im not sure what to do with all the 404 pages also, I know that both Google and Moz recommend a mixture of leaving some as 404s and redirect others and Id like to know what the community here suggests. The 404s are a mix of the following: Blog posts and articles that have disappeared (some of these have good back-links too) Urls that look like they used to belong to users (the site used to have a forum) which where deleted when the forum was removed, some of them look like they were removed for spam reasons too eg /user/buy-cheap-meds-online and others like that Other urls like this /node/4455 (or some other random number) Im thinking I should permanently redirect the blog posts to the homepage or the blog but Im not sure what to do about all the others? Surely having so many 404s like this is hurting my crawl rate?
Technical SEO | | linklander0 -
Home Page Ranking Instead of Service Pages
Hi everyone! I've noticed that many of our clients have pages addressing specific queries related to specific services on their websites, but that the Home Page is increasingly showing as the "ranking" page. For example, a plastic surgeon we work with has a page specifically talking about his breast augmentation procedure for Miami, FL but instead of THAT page showing in the search results, Google is using his home page. Noticing this across the board. Any insights? Should we still be optimizing these specific service pages? Should I be spending time trying to make sure Google ranks the page specifically addressing that query because it SHOULD perform better? Thanks for the help. Confused SEO :/, Ricky Shockley
Technical SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Is there a way to index important pages manually or to make sure a certain page will get indexed in a short period of time??
Hi There! The problem I'm having is that certain pages are waiting already three months to be indexed. They even have several backlinks. Is it normal to have to wait more than three months before these pages get an indexation? Is there anything i can do to make sure these page will get an indexation soon? Greetings Bob
Technical SEO | | rijwielcashencarry0400 -
Changing the order of items on page against Google Terms & Conditions?
Good day, I am wondering if anybody here has done something like this before. I have a page in one of my sites that contains a number of different - but related - free resources. The resources can be sorted in different ways once the user is on the page. Now I am starting an outreach campaign, and want to be able to send out custom URLS (which pretty much means they have different query strings after them like '?id=123' ) so that when a person clicks on the link to the page it brings up the stuff they are more likely to be interested in at the top. I expect - hope - that some of these people will put links back to this page as a result of this. Now all the links may be slightly different, but they will come to the same page and the content will look slightly different. I will make sure to have the rel=canonical tag in place. Does anybody know if this would be in violation of Google Terms and Conditions. I can't see how, but I wanted to see what the experts here on Moz think before moving forward. Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Google showing https:// page in search results but directing to http:// page
We're a bit confused as to why Google shows a secure page https:// URL in the results for some of our pages. This includes our homepage. But when you click through it isn't taking you to the https:// page, just the normal unsecured page. This isn't happening for all of our results, most of our deeper content results are not showing as https://. I thought this might have something to do with Google conducting searches behind secure pages now, but this problem doesn't seem to affect other sites and our competitors. Any ideas as to why this is happening and how we get around it?
Technical SEO | | amiraicaew0 -
Two Domains for the Same Page
We are creating a website for a client that will have hundreds of geographically driven landing pages. These pages will all have a similar domain structure. For example www.domain.com/georgia-atlanta-fastfood-121 We want the domain to be SEO friendly, however it also needs to be print friendly for a business card. (ex www.domain.com/121) The client has requested that we have two domains for each page. One for the Search Engines and then another shorter one for print/advertising purposes. If we do that will search engines the site for duplicate content? I really appreciate any recommendations. Thanks! Anna
Technical SEO | | TracSoft0 -
What is a fast Wordpress Host?
I have 8 or so sites hosted with Dreamhost and my main web site (http://www.nwrafting.com) is a Wordpress site hosted there as well. I'd like to move it to another hosts so that it isn't seen as related to my other sites that link to it. My other sites are good informational sites (example: http://www.caliriver.com) and are not doorway pages, but they do provide good links to my main business. This is a good idea to move my main sight, right? If so, can someone recommend a good host for me to put my one Wordpress site on? I'm looking for something that will load my pages fast. Please don't send me an affiliate link - I want to choose the best host not the one that pays the biggest commission. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | nwrafting0