Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have read a lot about 301 redirects and passing on PR to the new pages and understand this can take months to propogate through google. As I am in the process of updating my site and want to change some of the folders name, for example:
http://www.example.com/blue_widgets/
and I want to move this to
http://www.example.com/blue-widgets/
as I feel this will improve my results in the long run. If I use a 301 redirect in my .htaccess will my rankings pass to this new page, i.e. will they swap out the old link for the new link and keep the ranking the same?
Or is it best to stick with the old folders?
Thanks for your help and advice
[edited by: tedster at 4:21 pm (utc) on April 13, 2007]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it will never be owned [/edit]
We had to change our file names & structure quite drastically. We used 301 redirects and found the whole process to be far from trouble-free (if you look at my profile and see my various posts you'll get a bit of a time line on the problems).
We're probably over the worst now and our new site should over the next few months get back to its former glory and allow us to grow and have a great 2008.
I think that unless you really have to I'd stick to the page names you already have. In the very long term it might suit you better but do you really want to go through all the pain to get there?
Regards
Marra
Thank you for your guidance and assistance.
I think you pretty much answered my question and I will not do this. I do have some pages that are not doing well, pages 3 and 4 of the SERPS and for those I might alter.
Btw - what do you think your drop was due to? I see that your 301's were down for a few days, do you think this was the problem?
Ross
Thanks
Admittedly the site -developed over years- was a mess, with a mix of arcane naming conventions: mixed-case (/BlueRoundWidget.html), (/bl/rnd/yllw/wdgt.html), and various dynamic (/page1.php?param=x, /page2.php?param=x)
Google was very quick (2-3 weeks) to pick all the new pages and include them in its index instead of the various old ones and rank them decently.
No sitemap.xml, nothing. The whole process went so smoothly with Google, that a few days ago I was bold enough to add domain canonicalisation (redirect domain.tld -> www.domain.tld)
On the other hand, and I have to point it out, both Yahoo and MSN seem unable to work out 301's correctly. In addition they both can't seem to follow robots.txt and they keep requesting 3yr old obsolete, robots-excluded pages! (I've gone over Yahoo's link: results and put a 301 for every obsolete internal page linked from 3rd party sites)
Summary: 3+ months after the re-organisation, Google has indexed the entire site. Very few of the new pages are in Yahoo's index and practically no referrals at all (1%). I even submitted a sitemap.xml to Yahoo 10 days ago, to help it pickup the new pages.
From April logs:
Google requests
200: 4818
404: 80
Slurp requests
200: 3446
404: 1762 (!) - asking for robots.txt-excluded pages
I do think that the 301s being down may have been the start of our problems and if they'd stayed up we might not have the issues we do....but then again maybe not.
I also think that the structure/design of our site seems to have tripped a few filters e.g. there are some minor dupe issues that we're working on. I think that perhaps our new pages are being treated a little more severely than our old pages would have been...perhaps google doesn't yet trust these pages fully and so applies filters more strongly.
Talismon
It is my understanding - and I could do with someone who really knows about these things to confirm - that in google's eyes changing the extension is the same as changing the page name entirely. I.e google will only recognise that it is different but won't take in to account how different it is.
Surely there must be some sort of server setting that allows .aspx code to work with a .asp extension - again, could do with someone who really knows their stuff to help out with this one.
It is my understanding - and I could do with someone who really knows about these things to confirm - that in google's eyes changing the extension is the same as changing the page name entirely. I.e google will only recognise that it is different but won't take in to account how different it is.
Yes. Actually, any compliant user-agent will recognize .aspx as a different URL than .asp, or .htm as unique from .html, because they are, as much as page1.ext is different than page2.ext.
Surely there must be some sort of server setting that allows .aspx code to work with a .asp extension - again, could do with someone who really knows their stuff to help out with this one.
On Apache, mod_rewrite will. To enable 'rewriting' (serving content from one URL when another is requested) on IIS you will need to have ISAPI_Rewrite available on your server. (To the best of my knowledge. Hopefully someone will correct me quickly if I'm wrong and you can serve one from to the other without the ISAPI module. I try to avoid IIS.)
Justin
BTW I personally moved a little over 2000 pages recently using proper redirects without any issues.
My advise would be to keep what you have already.
There are advantages of using keyword URLs, but if you already have trusted, historic and well ranked URL's just let them be.
I successfully used 301's for a huge site last year and although traffic was affected in the short-term, top rankings were back within 3 weeks for most pages.
However, given the option, I would always use the historic version.
My next question is the file type, as it seems to be that changing from index.html to index.shtml or index.php is a new page in the engines eyes.
However when I look at the serps they only list the folder and not the file, so you see listed:
http://www.example.com/widget/
so will changing the file type really affect my rankings? or is the best guidance to stick with what you have and work with it if it ranks well?
Thanks in advance.
