credit: Aylanah

What are the behaviors of a healthy site?

• Unique Content
• Recent Content
• Growing Content Volume
• Outbound Links
• Growth of Inbound Links
• Design Changes

I want to talk about the last one: Design Changes. I have not tested this thoroughly, but, it seems, there is a positive to refreshing your design in the same vein as renewing content. It indicates that someone is maintaining the site. Watching the growth of the web I have noticed a distinct trend, internal restructuring.

Especially doing SEO I have seen the effects of internal restructuring and the rate of decay on  many sites. Any healthy site undergoes some degree of internal restructuring because of content changes and occasional design changes. Design changes, even when they do not add content, generally change the semantic relationship of internal links– changing the visibility of content and the relationship of your strong pages. I think that many people once they start an SEO campaign become afraid that they will lose rank when they make large changes. If you don’t make any changes you will just start to decay.

Obviously not everyone can design their own sites. But, spam sites and made for advertising sites are more likely to use a template, and certain plugins to support their goal of exploiting search traffic. Does the footprint left by employing a template affect your ability to gain authority? Specifically, could the proliferation of certain design trends indicate a common business? Like large headers images and design sites or the use of common WordPress themes on privately held domains.

If spammers and made for advertisining sites start using the same site templates that you have on your site it may start to impede your valuation and user trust.