Changed my URL's...now what?

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Changed my URL's...now what?

how will google treat this?

jimshu79

8:02 pm on Apr 29, 2004 (gmt 0)

I have a site www.widgetworld.com

I changed my urls from using underscores to hyphens. Will google automatically remove the old pages:
[widget.com...]

and then crawl the new:
[widget.com...]

Will it see anything as a duplicate, is there a possibility of a penalty?

I already know i'll lose a backlink and some PR for the update that it'll take so that's ok.

robotsdobetter

8:10 pm on Apr 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Will it see anything as a duplicate, is there a possibility of a penalty?

Long as all the old pages are deleted you should see no problems.

itisgene

8:18 pm on Apr 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Use 301 redirect from old pages to new pages. They used to be picked up in a few months but because of all the "New Site" problems, it may take longer these days.

jimshu79

10:54 pm on Apr 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

When you say delete the old pages, do you mean delete the .htm files off the server and the change the links that point to them to the new .htm files? Cause that has been done.

The question is this....
Will Google start spidering at the index and find the new links? Or will it try to go back to the old URL's and therefore getting bounced to the index since the old ones dont exist...?

And about the 301 redirect...can anyone create those or does your hosting company and what they offer come into play here...?

i'm clueless....

mcavic

1:00 am on May 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Will Google start spidering at the index and find the new links? Or will it try to go back to the old URL's

If the old pages no longer exist, Google will drop them. Then, if it can find the new pages by way of crawling from your home page, it'll index those.

can anyone create those

It depends on what language and what kind of server you're using. But you can't normally do a 301 redirect with just a .htm file.

jdMorgan

1:08 am on May 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Automatic underscore-to-hyphen redirection [webmasterworld.com] for Apache server using mod_rewrite -- httpd.conf or .htaccess privileges required.

Jim

mcavic

1:18 am on May 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

Ooh, that's neat.

jimshu79

5:30 pm on May 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

cool thanks. since i'm just using html, i just killed the old files and renamed the new ones with the hyphen, checked all my links, and then validated all the files. so i'll sit back and wait patiently...thanks again.

kaled

6:28 pm on May 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

You might consider recreating key_pages.html placing the following in the <HEAD> section of each page.

<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" CONTENT="0;URL=http://www.yourdomain.com/new-page.html">

This should assist users and Googlebot if no other redirection is used. However, if it's a new site, this may not be worthwhile.

Kaled.