Forum Moderators: open
I was reading somewhere (here?) about not having the word "link" in your urls so I renamed my link pages from www.example.com/links.htm and links2.htm.
The only pages linking to these were my own internal pages.
The new pages started with greyed PR but then went to PR0. I waited and waited but still PR0 (the old pages had PR4)
Anyway, I discovered that I hadn't removed the old links pages www.example.com/links.htm and www.example.com/links2.htm and so I now assume I'm being penalised for duplicate content DOH!
Question: What is the fastest way to sort this out?
1) .htaccess 301 redirect of old to new?
or 2) relink back to the old pages?
or 3) Request the cache of the old pages be removed from G?
or 4) Something else?
Oh, and before I get flamed, it was a legit mistake. I was not trying to artificially boost the PR of my links pages.
Thanks
Kenton
[edited by: ciml at 9:21 am (utc) on Feb. 18, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified URLs. [/edit]
1. Your PR will update when google updates it, which we have been waiting on.
2. Make a 301 redirect. How to? search this forum.
3. Delete the old page.
4. PR0 now-a-days mean that the page has been indexed by google. You will see it go grey bar and pr0 for sometime .. which means freshbot is coming and going.
Once google catches the 301 redirect the PR will transfer automatically over 1 or 2 updates.
Someone here very kindly told me that the best way to get old pages out of the index is to make a blank HTML page with this in the head:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
Then submit that page to Google submit. Googlebot goes along, gets an explicit instruction not to index it and does as he is told. My site was in a complete mess after a bout of trial and error (mostly the later) tweaks in its structure. This advice very quickly sorted it out.
Best wishes
Sid