2 Newbie questions

changing dynamic urls to fixed and where is googlebot?

[gunther]

Hello all,

I'm a newbie to this SEO scene, and I have two questions:

* I'm about to change my dynamic urls (2 params) to static '.html' links with mod_rewrite. But I'm a little bit afraid that googlebot will think I'm offering duplicate content on my site when spidering with the old and new urls (both will work), and penalize me for that.
Any comments/ideas?

* I run a PR6 site, which used to get like 20 googlebot hits a day, which has now dropped to 1 a day since the end of september (only the main page gets indexed)
What could be the reason for this? I introduced anchor (#) links on many pages, and a few meta tags, but nothing else I can think of...

regards,

Günther.

[Nick_W]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Gunther!

First, you could use robots.txt to stop google crawling the old scheme.

Second, maybe G has just decided that only your home page changes regularly enough to spider daily now?

Nick

[gunther]

Is there actually any possibility to get penalized by googlebot if I'm not blocking it to access my content in the second way?
(I'm not feeling very confident editing robots.txt in order to filter out the right urls)

Or will the old urls just drop out of google search after a while?

Günther.

[Nick_W]

Or will the old urls just drop out of google search after a while?

If you stop G from crawling the old url's then yes: This is exactly what will happen.

Nick

[gunther]

Sorry, I think I didn't express myself very well.

My question was actually whether I could get into trouble with googlebot (penalized,...) if I didn't do anything else than changing all links on my site from dynamic to fixed.

Will googlebot 'understand' what I did, or will it both use the old dynamic urls (that will still work), and the new fixed urls, and conclude that I'm offering duplicate content?

Or will it just index what is on my site and not bother about pages being reachable via two different urls (one fixed and one dynamic)?

Günther.

[Nick_W]

Definately a dupe content problem. You need to fix it so that google only gets the new urls...

Nick

[UKreg]

I have a site (PR5) where the regular stories were originally indexed using url variables

eg index.asp?article=sk278skahw92

all of these were indexed by G.

I then changed to a SE safe version a few months ago eg

index.asp/article=sk278skahw92

and G indexed all of these. I experienced no fall in traffic from G whatsoever, despite the fact that the old style (which still works) was and is still bringing in traffic.