Best rebuilding strategy to deal with Google's "new reality"?

[ichthyous]

Hi there...I am rebuilding my site after being totally blitzed by Big Daddy. My current site is an image archive of sorts and contains a large number of images organized by category and subcategory on dynamic pages with very little text. An additional problem is that the site uses a shopping cart which produces very long URL strings with no keywords in them. I decided to register new domains which have keywords relating to each picture collection in them (i.e. "theme-keyword-photos.com") and break up the content into smaller one-theme sitelets. Each sitelet will have Gallery installed, and will utilize search engine friendly URLS. The problem is that the new sites won't have any links coming into them for a while. Would it be better to just install Gallery on my current site to replace the old shopping cart and build another very large multi-category site which at least has links already coming in? I am concerned that building smaller sitelets may take a very long time to get indexed and produce traffic without any established links. I would be interested in hearing opinions on this. thanks!

[2by4]

fix the current site, if you install search engine friendly mods, and do the proper 301s from old style to new style, you should have little problem, and you won't lose any links. But the proper 301s need to be written, that's not easy to do with really messy urls, but it can be done. If you don't feel like you can do it, hire somebody who can, a good rewrite guy can generally create what you need in a few hours, and it's a one time expense.

If you make new sites, it's going to probably get seen as a network or linkfarm type thing, and it's a pain to maintain long term anyway, and you lose the ability to market one site.

I don't like splitting sites unless there is a very good reason to do it, but if they are all gallery stuff, that's the theme already.

[LuckyGuy]

ichthyous,

regarding the sites in top ten you should have only little navigation and low world density on our pages. That will help. Allthough some outbound links could help. This is what is see is google hunting for. Low content with low navigation with low user friendly pages.

[edited by: tedster at 7:21 pm (utc) on June 13, 2006]

[ichthyous]

if you install search engine friendly mods, and do the proper 301s from old style to new style, you should have little problem, and you won't lose any links. But the proper 301s need to be written, that's not easy to do with really messy urls, but it can be done.

2by4 i won't be able to just install mod rewrite to rewrite current URLs...the store wont work that way. I will have to replace the current site entirely with a gallery site that uses SEF URLs. When you say to write 301s from old style to new style what do you mean exactly? Do the permanent redirects redirect content pages from the old site to the new one, i.e if i have a page called mysite.com/store/content.html do i redirect to mysite.com/gallery/similarcontent.html? Please explain on what the 301s are used for exactly. The links coming into my site mostly just link to my domain, and not to specific pages. A few link to specific html pages and i can try to have them updated. Will this fact make the whole process easier?

[edited by: ichthyous at 7:25 pm (utc) on June 13, 2006]

[ichthyous]

lucky guy I'm not sure what you mean by low content. I have low content now since it's all images...I can assure you that it doesn't get Google's attention. Recently all of those pages went supplemental in fact. I have a PR 4 and I just rebuilt the store so that all of the images are one click away from the home page, and not buried in subdirectories. I am also adding chunks of text to each category above the images. This may or may not help, but google is so slow in indexing my site that it will take a long time to find out I fear. The biggest problem is that the URL string are very long and composed just of numbers, no juicy keywords. There is also a big nav menu on the left hand side of each page (except the actual image pages)...when the search engines index the categories this menu gets indexed each time and that's what comes up in the description. The only thing I can do is move the menu to the left hand side of each page...but from a user friendly point of view that would not be good.