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
-
301 and the base URL
Hi, please bear with me as I'm pretty new to all this! I've my base URL but obviously want to add keywords to it for seo purposes. Should I redirect from the base URL to the URL with the keywords appended? So my landing page goes from say www.moz.com to www.moz.com/keywords-here. If I do that, should I replicate all the meta data (descriptions etc) on the original landing page? Or does it not matter? Thanks, Nick
On-Page Optimization | | nickwoodward0 -
Changes taken over in the SERP's: How long do I have to wait until i can rely on the (new) position?
I changed different things on a particular page (mainly reduced the exaggerated keyword density --> spammy). I made it recrawl by Google (Search Console). The new version has now already been integrated in the SERP's.Question: Are my latest changes (actual crawled page in the SERP's is now 2 days old) already reflected in the actual position in the SERP's or should I wait for some time (how long?) to evaluate the effect of my changes? Can I rely on the actual position or not?
On-Page Optimization | | Cesare.Marchetti0 -
To change or not to change. DO we update our HTTP page to HTTPS? especially those with basic forms (phone, email, name)??
I recently went to a conference where a speaker strongly urged us to migrate to HTTPS before January 2017. I don't see any other sites referencing to make the switch before January 2017. whats the deal? 😉
On-Page Optimization | | millenniumsi0 -
Is it still worth changing a url with half the pages target keyphrase in to the entire phrase still ?
Hi If a pages url has half the pages target keyphrase (i.e. 1 word instead of 2) is it still worth changing to include entire keyphrase (2 words) given need to then add 301 redirects etc after ? If it was a new page then I would definately include full keyphrase but the page is a few months old and has quite high page authority as is (i know a 301 should transfer most authority) but given this page and other sub pages would also need to be 301'd if this change occurs and the dev time/cost that would incurred/charged by the design/dev agency. Also thinking Google being cleverer now (the pages content will be about the target kw) so thinking G would work it out from rest of page content and partial match kw in url. In other words to best target keyphrase is it best to leave url as is or change url to include keyphrase ? For example if the pages target kw is 'swimming clubs' and the current url is www.franksleisurecentres.com/clubs changing it to www.franksleisurecentres.com/swimming-clubs :Thanks Dan
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Google Crawl Errors from vbseo change
We have vbseo setup on our site and for some reason a setting was changed unexpectedly and was un-noticed where it changed the URL of all the pages and so none of our pages were getting indexed by google any longer due to 401 errors. Most of our SE traffic fell off. We discovered the issue a couple weeks ago and we changed the setting back so that the URLs are the same as they were originally before but in Google webmasters it's still showing crawl errors and our search engine traffic hasn't recovered at all. We have sitemaps being sent daily.
On-Page Optimization | | RudySF0 -
Changing Subfolder that has been crawled before
Question: I am using a wordpress multisite and I enabled the crawl options yesterday www.abc.com/subfolder <-original but i find that www.abc.com/sub is good enough I checked the site:abc.com but I find that my pages in the /subfolder has been crawled before. Can I just change it to www.abc.com/sub or it will raise duplicate content issue?
On-Page Optimization | | joony20080 -
Do Schema.org changes impact local SEO
I've reviewed the various presentation and blog posts from SMX advanced regarding local SEO and I didn't see any mention of Schema.org and microformats. Has any research or case studies been presented supporting that implementation of Schema.org microformats will improve local results? Here is one example where I've implemented the basics in the address info of the footer. http://bit.ly/lZQYeg Any tips on how to further optimize with schema.org markup?
On-Page Optimization | | DotCar0 -
On-page optimisation for CMS based sites
With so many sites being based on a CMS, and with so many hundreds of different CMS out there, as SEO consultants how do you recommend dealing with on-page optimisation for a client where you discover their site is built with a CMS you have not previously used (or even heard of!)
On-Page Optimization | | bjalc20110