move english language page to root

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move english language page to root

redirect page to root

bolognese

1:51 pm on Oct 16, 2009 (gmt 0)

Hi,

Somewhere else on this forum I was advised to move the page, that in the first place only was a translation of mainpages of my Dutch website. The Dutch index.shtml was still in the root.
Meanwhile I have that much English content and as few visitors already, that I expect it to be a good thing to move the English index_en.shtml to /index.shtml and move the current /index.shtml to index_nl.shtml.
It it ok to put both redirects in the htaccess at the same time or will this cause problems, an endless loop perhaps. Of course I don't want to lose the rankings and thus visitors to my Dutch pages.

Thanks in advance.

jdMorgan

4:48 pm on Oct 16, 2009 (gmt 0)

Yes, you can not redirect A to B and then at the same time redirect B to A, or you will indeed end up with an "endless" redirection loop.

If this were my site and I *had* to change the URLs, I'd redirect to en.example.com/ and nl.example.com/, and internally rewrite those subdomains to (sub)directories as needed. After using that for a year or more and getting existing external links to example.com dutch pages updated (as many as possible) to point to nl.example.com, then it would likely be possible to redirect en.example.com to example.com without too much of a search ranking loss.

But this two-step process involves the risk of *two* transition periods during which your "english" rankings may suffer (for a few days to many months). As a result, I think I'd just move example.com/index_en.shtml to en.example.com/ or leave the site the way it is...

Try to "design" your URL-assignment system -- to plan ahead for growth and changing products/services/business focus. With a good plan, you may be able to avoid ever having to change another URL again, unless a court order forces you to do it...

Jim

bolognese

11:16 am on Oct 17, 2009 (gmt 0)

Some time ago I tried this subdomain thing for the different subjects of my site, for example events.example.com. But when I right clicked on the page and selected "source" I did not see the source of the page I designed, but a short frameset code. How will google be able to crawl and index my events page when I use the subdomain events.example.com url for it?

g1smd

1:04 pm on Oct 17, 2009 (gmt 0)

If you use frames, they can't.

Don't use frames.

jdMorgan

4:51 pm on Oct 17, 2009 (gmt 0)

Yeah, frames died in 1999, due to the problems that they caused with getting indexed in search, so that's why you don't see much use of frames any more. Search engines *can* index framed sites, but they don't tend to do as well at ranking as non-framed sites because the 'page' URL points to the framing document, which has little or no content, just a frameset.

Jim

bolognese

7:42 am on Oct 18, 2009 (gmt 0)

My hosting provider provides a control panel where I have option to create 1000 subdomains.

I created de.example.com and en.example.com, pointed it to the appropriate index file and had to wait some time before they were activated.

In IE now my own xhtml is shown when I view the source. That was different 2 years ago.
In FF there is still between the HEAD and BODY tag:

After the BODY tag there is:

<H1></H1>
<P></P>
<P><A HREF="example.com/index_en.shtml">Click here to continue >></A><BR>
<A HREF="example.com/index_en.shtml">Klik hier om verder te gaan >></A></P>
</BODY>
</NOFRAMES>
</HTML>

Does my provider use an outdated way of handling subdomains?

Will googlebot interprete the code the source code the IE does?

jdMorgan

11:32 pm on Oct 18, 2009 (gmt 0)

Looks like a frame-based redirect -- How quaint!

This is a very high-technology solution -- for 1996.

If you care about search ranking you need to get rid of that ASAP...

Jim