Forum Moderators: phranque
Do I now update my sitemap to point directly at the new page names I have created or do I point at the old pages and let the 301 take care of it.
My thinking is if I point to the new pages when Google indexes it will see these pages as duplicate, however if I point to the old page name a 301 will happen which will point the spider to the new page and no duplicate content will occur.
Can anybody advise if this is correct?
Rename the files, delete any unwanted files leftover with old names, and link to the new names in your site map and navigation links. Be sure the site map is not disallowed by meta tags or robots.txt. Then create .htaccess rewrite rules to R=301 the old file names to the new ones.
You can also list the old names as disallowed in robots.txt, unless there are too many of them.
Note: Don't be surprised to see links to the old names continue to appear in SERPs for at least a year. My 301s send visitors to the new pages and show the new URL in their addressbar. I still see search engine results for files renamed or deleted several years ago! It isn't worth the risk of removing them from the Google Index using the manual removal tool because of the danger of accidently removing your entire website for 6 months. I just serve a 410 GONE over and over, to the same bots (and 404s to those that do not understand 410 responses).
Wiz
We've changed the directory structure as well as the page names. So would you reccomend disallowing old_dir_name/* in the robots.txt?
So would you reccomend disallowing old_dir_name/* in the robots.txt?
Absolutely!
Disallow: /old_directory/
From the site map perspective, that means leaving the site map pointing to the old URLs for awhile, then switch them over after you're sure the 'bots have seen the 301s.
Be aware that G and Y (and possibly others) get confused by too many redirects; I'd advise a slow roll-out on these new URLs, and not an all-at-once switchover. Most sites experience a temporary drop in the SERPS --up to several months-- after doing a massive URL rename. Be sure you're prepared for that, and that you really need to change the URLs [w3.org].
Note that URLs and filenames need not be lexically related in any way; They are two different ways of specifying a resource; URLs for the Web, and filenames inside the server. Mod_rewrite and/or scripting can be used to keep the same URLs but associate them with new filenames.
Jim
If I put a 301 on old/pagename.htm to point to new/pagename.htm how will I know when G has been redirected and knows about the 301? Will the new/pagename.htm show up in G's cache?
If I put a 301 on old/pagename.htm to point to new/pagename.htm how will I know when G has been redirected and knows about the 301? Will the new/pagename.htm show up in G's cache?
Go to google.com and type this into the search field: site:www.yourdomain.com
Change www.yourdomain.com to your actual domain and extension (.com, .org, .net, etc). Try this search with and without the www prefix. You may see different results.
Google will return a listing of all the pages on your website that are in it's indexes. Once the old pages have been re-indexed by the 301s they will probably have the word "Supplimental" on the bottom line. As you see the new pages listed click on the "Cache" link to see if the got it right.
You can also read your access logs to see what pages are visited by GoogleBot.
Once the new pages are in the cache it should be safe to remove links to the old names, and use 301 redirects to the new names. You should also check the other major Search Engines before removing all old links. Yahoo and MSN also use the site: command.
Wiz
