I want to move my outdated HTML website to a neater Wordpress theme. Will I lose my ranking on google (page 1) if I do this?
Will I lose my google rank #3 if I change my website from HTML to a wordpress format?I disagree with the other answer--CPC or paid click advertising on search engines does not impact your ranking in the non-paid results. Not for any major engine including Google, Yahoo and MSN/Live.
It depends on what part of your site ranks #3. Do you mean just your domain? Like yoursite.com as the home page ranks #3? If so, then it is likely you will retain that ranking as long as you keep similar content on your new Wordpress home page.
If the ranking is some other URL, like yoursite.com/somestuff/thispage.html, then as long as that content is maintained at that location after the wordpress upgrade you should be OK as well.
Search engines are pretty good at maintaining rankings during a website redesign as long as the content does not change that much, and you don't destroy the URLs from the old site when launching the new one.
Look into 301 redirects to redirect yoursite.com/somestuff/thispage.html to yoursite.com/newlocation/ for instances where you can't maintain the same content at the same URLs. To search engines, even yoursite.com/somestuff and www.yoursite.com/somestuff and yoursite.com/SomeStuff are treated as unique pages. It is up to you the site owner to use internal linking techniques and redirects to let search engines know where your content is and where it may have moved. Will I lose my google rank #3 if I change my website from HTML to a wordpress format?Search Engines change their crawlers or other paradigms in choosing front rankers all the time. It's unusual for anyone to keep the same or similar rankings on a continuous basis, unless they have paid CPC ads.
As long as the theme type is still honored on the WWW, then it's still up to chance (or at the whim of the SEO guys).
