Searchenginegenie.com

I told the person re-designing my website that I don't want to lose my rankings in Google for individual pages.

For example, out of 39,000,000 pages that come up for "wealth distribution," this page of mine is #3 (or 4, depending on how you count):


What he suggested I do is, leave that page on my server, and then make the re-designed page the one that links to from a link on the site itself. The article content would be the same, but the top and bottom common borders would be somewhat different.

Since the bulk of the text on the two pages -- the original wealth distribution page, and the re-designed one -- would be quite similar, would this likely trigger some alarm in Google's innards that would cause it to penalize that page, or penalize my entire site, or something even worse?!

There are about 100 pages on my site that are highly ranked for various keywords, that this would apply to.

Thanks!

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No it wont affect your current SEO ranking in any way. Anything that wont affect your visitors wont affect your search engines too. Keep doing what you are doing now.

Another helpful think is the Canonical tag to let Google know that you realize you have Duplicate content.

Depending on who you ask: you won't be "penalized" for having duplicate content, but only one of the duplicate pages will be indexed...