Forum Moderators: phranque
1) Will it affect my ranking on search engines?
2) What about all those people outside linking to my pages like mydomain.com/directory/jokes/?Do i make a 301 from directory to the root path so that i wont lose them?
3) Will my site be dropped out because of big changes in the path?
Thanks.
You can do what you are asking. And those are very good questions. Let me see if I can answer in an order to make sense.
1. Yes, you would use a 301, permanently moved, redirect to accomplish your goal.
2. The inbound link count is transfered with the 301 redirect. The tough part here is how long does it takes for the search engines to pick those changes up and assign credit to the new location.
3. The effect on ranking is very dependent on number 2. If the links are picked up quickly there is a better chance you will continue your ranking where you are currently. The other thing to consider when thinking about ranking is how much have the pages changed in relation to the old pages. My personal experience is that M and Y both pick up these changes fairly quickly, G does what G feels like doing. (I recently changed the entire structure of one of my sites, and both M and Y replaced the old pages with the new ones in the SERPs as they were picked up. IOW no loss of ranking.) The changes are just now beginning to take effect in G (about 5 weeks later.)
Hope this helps. (You might want to check some of the discussions more closely related to ranking for more information on this topic before making a decision. EG Google, Webmaster General, SEM, etc.)
Justin
* Please, note these are my personal experiences and do not necessarily indicate a pattern or promise that any other site will be treated the same by the SE's and their rankings.
