Change from Table Based to DIV based

[JohnHerrigel]

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!

[evolvingSEO]

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