Highlights:
- When you redesign a site, its rankings in search engines may go nuts.
- Search engines commonly use the HTML of web pages to make sense of the content.
- Webmasters should use semantically similar HTML when they redesign their sites.
Gary Illyes, a member of the Google Search Relations team posted on LinkedIn “when you redesign a site, its rankings in search engines may go nuts”.
That means changing your website theme or similar actions may hurt your SEO rankings in search engines like Google.
He explained that search engines use the HTML of your pages to make sense of the content. So when you change your website themes or design, it also changed the core HTML of your web pages.
“If for example you break up paragraphs, remove H tags in favor of CSS styling, or add breaking tags (especially true for CJK languages), you change the HTML parsers’ output, which in turn may change the site’s rankings,” he also added in that Linkedin post.
You should try to use semantically similar HTML tags when you redesign the site.
Also if possible then please avoid adding tags on web pages where you don’t actually need them.
Gary Illyes posted on LinkedIn.