PR and Doc. type question

[shyspinner]

I am thinking of converting my site over to css. I use it now, but I want to jump in all the way and move away from tables for positioning elements in the page. If I were to do this, and also change the doc. type of each page, would my page rank have to be established all over again?

Thanks if you can answer!

Lori
http://www.countrywillowgraphics.com

[sudhani]

Hi Lori,

Page rank is given to the individaul pages. So as long as you keep the directory structure and file names unchanged .... your page rank wont change.

Keeping the links pointing to different pages in yourwebsite as they are will also help google not to revise your PR.

[ronniethedodger]

Originally Posted by kountrywillow

If I were to do this, and also change the doc. type of each page, would my page rank have to be established all over again?

Short answer -- yes.

It will take some time for Google to come around and index the new pages with the different doc extensions. The amount of time to accomplish this will depend on where you set up links to point to the new pages, and how quickly Google will discover those pages and index them.

If you leave the extensions the same, then basicly you will not lose anything in regards to PR. To Google they are the same pages.

If you have a need to change the extensions, I might suggest that you carry both versions and the links that point to them. Carry both until Google has a chance to index the new pages and establish their proper PR. You will find that they will go from no ranking, to a PR Zero, and finally settle in at the final PR. This PR may be different than the previous versions ... no one can say what it will be. In general, if you have the same link structure and hierchial format it should be the same.

Before all of that happens though, do not remove the older versions. You will have two choices, retain both versions (the older for browsers that do not support CSS for example) or outright removal of the older version. In the case of the latter, first remove all internal links from your site without deleting the actual pages....it will be safe to remove them after Google removes it from it's index (if they even do at all).

[shyspinner]

Thanks for replying both of you! Thanks for clearing this up for me : )