Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The structure of the site was originally widgets.cctld/place.htm - however on in depth investigation it appears that 90% of the top ten results for each location (800) used widgets atleast once in the file name so we are now considering changing this to widgets.cctld/widgets-place.htm.
widgets.cctld/widgets-place.htm however already exists and is a sitemap file for widgets in that particular place and lists all wiggets in that palce.
So our solution is now to literally flip the content between these file sets - thus the content that was previously on widgets.cctld/place.htm will be moved to widgets.cctld/widgets-place.htm and vice versa. And modify the internal navigation to refelct the new file content
I know that this in an orthordox solution but see the benefit in not having to change page titles or file names or 301 the old files to the new ones.
Will Googlebot ( and other spiders ) get confused when the content of one set of files in flipped to another site of files ?
Still, it would probably be better to pick a new filename for one of the pair.
it appears that 90% of the top ten results for each location (800) used widgets atleast once in the file name
I'd be wary about using that study to motivate such a dramatic change. You still have "widgets" in the domain name, correct? You may be seeing a common practice among the website designers, rather than a causative factor in the ranking algorithm.
Keyword once in the url - it's a bit of a factor.
Keyword several times in the url? I'm not so sure that it helps any extra.
Thanks - It is still early days for the site which is why I want ot get it done straight awy - we have another 2000 widget descriptions to add so need to decide if we are going to make this change or live with it for the forseable future.
The pages in question don't really rank yet or drive much traffic so the index getting confused is not really a worry. what is a concern is if this could have a site wide impact in the future?
