Losing Google ranking history from renaming urls

[eljacko]

I am re doing my website but am naming the folders with a - instead of an _. Iam worried that my website will lose history but the page that ranks for keywords in google is the home page. Will this effect anything and how fast do you think it will take for google to re index the new websites pages.

[tedster]

Your worries may be well-founded. The folder renaming will create new internal urls for your site, and replacing the "_" with a "-" may not give you enough extra value to compensate.

If that's all you are doing in changing urls, I'd re-think doing it. Notice that DMOZ has not renamed their underscore urls even though they are certainly aware of the issues. Fixing their canoncial issues has been a big enough challenge for them, and that's a much bigger issue anyway.

Do you have good backlinks to your Home Page? That might save your Home Page rankings when the internal PR circulation first gets broken, and then recalculated.

[keyplyr]

Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask et al see "_" and "-" the same now so there's no longer a need to change them, if SEO was the motivation. This was announced several months ago (sorry I can't reference the source.)

[tedster]

Well, I'd say the way the two characters are treated by Google is now "closer" to the same, but there is still a difference. Just try searching for each of those characters on their own and you'll see evidence of different handling.

[eljacko]

Hello

Thanks a lot guys, that's very helpful. I have a lot of the back links going into the main home page, which is why on all the terms all I see is the home page ranking.

Would restructuring the rest of the website play a part in the home page not ranking?

[jd01]

Yes, the changes could have an effect.

Did you properly 301 the old URLs to the new ones?

Justin

[iowasmiles]

I think you're hitting on the fringes of SEO knowledge here. Why don't you try just one page, or a couple of pages, that are ranked in Google and see what it does to your rankings? Then report back. Give it a few weeks.
I think a lot of times in this business you have to learn stuff by experimenting.
My guess is that renaming the pages won't boost you.

[g1smd]

>> Google ... see "_" and "-" the same now so there's no longer a need to change them <<

>> This was announced several months ago <<

No it wasn't. Someone from google mentioned at some conference that it might possibly happen in the future.

Matt Cutts also clarified a few weeks later that it was being looked at, but nothing had happened yet.

[jd01]

And here's the link to g1smd's point, with a link to MC's Blog:

Dashes NOT the same as underscores. Aug. 10, 2007 [webmasterworld.com]

Justin

[g1smd]

Ah, I was looking a bit further back than that. I thought it was June or July sometime.

Thanks for finding it. That's the one.

[tedster]

Further evidence of different treatment for those still in doubt: Do a Google search on just the _ character. You will get hundreds of millions of documents. Now do a search on the - character. You will get... no results at all. Even inurl:- still gives no results.

[skywriteing]

For SEO reasons the folders should be named 3 random letters. This avoids "coloring" every other word on the page with a word that may not suit it for ranking reasons. Then if the page is an "index", you don't have to name it....double SEO pat-on-the-head.

[tedster]

Not sure I follow you, skywriteing. Isn't that semantic "coloring" exactly what you want? Of course, this assumes the page is actually in an appropriate directory.

For me, this is an Information Architecure issue: create a good IA and the folder names will be exacatly what is needed for the pages they contain.

Here are some threads that expand on what I'm saying:
Information Architecture for the Small Site - part 1 [webmasterworld.com]
Information Architecture for the Small Site - part 2 [webmasterworld.com]
Putting Information Architecture into Practice [webmasterworld.com]