Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm going to post in here any changes I notice, but for now, here's what I had and what I did:
1) page titles
I've shortened my page titles, and made them have better relevancy to the pages content
Relevancy before change - 60%
Relevancy after change - > 80%
2) meta tags - description
Shortened the descriptions (below 150 characters, were over 250 before) and improved description relevancy
Relevancy before - 30%
Relevancy after - 70%
3) meta tags - keywords
Lowered the keyword count to about 10 (was more then 30~40), and improved relevancy
Relevancy before - 20-25%
Relevancy after - 60%
4) modrewrite - url change
a few years ago, my urls were in the following format:
domain/index.php?widget_id=1
later I rewrote that to:
domain/widget_name/widgets/widget_id/details.html
for about 2 years, google kept both the rewritten url and the ?widget_id ones, which I guess wasn't too healthy for my rankings
I did a yet another rewriting of the url to just:
domain/widget_name
and made a 301 permanent redirect to that address from the previous 2 types of rewritings (hopefully, google will pick up the new urls, and drop the old ones from it's listings)
Google's webmaster tools shows me I have about 800 incoming links for all those urls that I've just changed and permanently moved, so I guess I can kiss good bye the good effect from those links.
(this is only for the mod rewritten links, the homepage url stays the same and that's where most of the external links to my site are)
5) rel="nofollow"
I had an extremely poor PR distribution across my pages.
My homepages generates different lists of "widgets" (not completely different, but they're kinda rotating), so neither of those got any special attention from google's ranking algorithm.
Also, on my main page, I have 10 links of "recent forum posts", and the forum is in a different sub domain, so I guess it hurts the pr flow as well.
I've put a "nofollow" tag to 60% of my navigation links (like forgotten password, help, contact us etc.) and to all the forum links on site.
I did all of this about 30 hours ago.
I'm seeing google already cached about 10~20% of the newly created urls (and is already showing me "duplicate meta tags" and "duplicate titles" in the webmaster tools (I guess it'll take some time (months?) for it to take notice of the 301 redirect and remove the obsolete urls).
Anyone with experience like mine?
Do you think I've just effectively killed the rankings of my site, or all those changes may lead to something good?
Do you have any advice?
Thanks guys!
1) Google indexed and cached most of the new urls
2) In webmaster tools, I'm seeing some of the old urls being dropped from the "duplicated title tag" section, some are still there, even though google already indexed their new version, and is showing it in SERPs
3) No change in traffic whatsoever, but google is now showing my new urls in the SERPs, and all the organic traffic from google comes from those
4) No PR for any of the new urls, still a gray bar
5) No change to the Site Links, google still shows the previous urls in those
So far - so good.
I was thinking of making 2 more big changes to this site, but:
a) The first one is going xhtml 1.0 strict (from the current html 4.01, very table heavy) html code.
I have already built the layout according to the best html building practices and web standards, but I consider this a rather huge change and I'm afraid google will think the pages (all of them!) are completely new, and my ranking will sink.
I will probably turn the new layout "ON" step by step, like wingslevel does, once all the duplicate content is removed from google's index, and the *important* new urls get some PR
b) The other change is - trimming down the links count on each page.
99% of those links are internal. Right now my site has a 120 ~ 190 links on each page (depending on page and day, cause I have a calendar like thing that shows relevant stuff for each day, etc.).
I also have a TOP 50 (which is a solid 50 links on each page).
All those links seem to be a lot for the search engines.
It makes for a great user experience (I have 3 columns: left one - top widgets, center one - today/yesterday/tomorrow widgets, right one - weekly calendar of widgets).
All of it was done for improving the user experience.
But the more I get into SEO stuff, the more I'm inclined to think I'll have to hurt my users experience (by removing some links) in order to improve rankings.
Is it worth it? No. For now at least.
I'm seeing google already cached about 10~20% of the newly created urls (and is already showing me "duplicate meta tags" and "duplicate titles" in the webmaster tools (I guess it'll take some time (months?) for it to take notice of the 301 redirect and remove the obsolete urls).Yes, it takes a while. Ive experienced the same.
I also have a TOP 50 (which is a solid 50 links on each page).You might wanna watch out on that or at least lower the number of links on ALL pages.
I'm seeing PR for all 50 of the Top 50 widgets I've linked from every page.
It's main page PR-2, for each and everyone of them. I guess because they're way too many to distribute main page pr-1 to all of them.
Still no change to the site links, and Google is still in the (long, but steady) process of finding and dropping the duplicated urls.
In related news - Happy new year all :)
I'd like to have seen the result without yet another URL change, and with a new redirect from the very old dynamic to the existing, at the time, "static" URL format.
