Apache's Rewrite & Google Questions

Does our URL structure look good? And some Google Questions.

[Catnip]

OK we have created a new way of displaying our URL's and I want to check with all the great minds on here to see if they can see any problems with this new method. Here is an example of how a URL is written now on our website:
http://www.example.com/charters/city/1198/state/9/country/371/

And here is with our new rewriter method:

http://www.example.com/adventures/united-states_orlando.html

Now we are planning on changing over the website end of this month just before the Google deep crawl. The old URL's will give a moved permanently. Is this the best time to make this move and is using moved permanently the proper way of doing this? I know everyone is sick of hearing about Google, but it does bring us 75% of our traffic. We currently have over 40k pages listed in Google so we want to do this without disturbing our Google traffic.

Thanks for your time and comments,

CatNip
:)

[lazerzubb]

Everything looks very good to me, the whole solution i think will work right trough.

[djgreg]

I think this is a good solution,

I think you should do it before the next deepcrawl, that the pages are in with the next update!

[Marcia]

>>The old URL's will give a moved permanently

Just make sure it's 301 not 302.

[rfgdxm1]

Definitely do it now. The deep crawl could come at any time.

[jimbeetle]

And this will be great for "derived" PR. Instead of a page being 7 or 8 steps away you've got it down to 2.

[Chico_Loco]

Have you noticed any server performance hit's after making these changes?

I'd imagine rewrite for so many different URL's and level is complex and sluggish, is it not?

[weteo]

To be perfect, use
[example.com...]
or
[example.com...]

"states_orlando" is not giving you any points

[example.com...]

[atadams]

http://www.example.com/adventures/united-states_orlando.html

wouldn't be any different than

http://www.example.com/adventures/united-states-orlando.html

would it?

[jpavery]

we did a site change last september (new urls) - losing our old URLs (eventhough they showed the home page - in fact www.mysite.com/anything.html would show the home page - and it was not a 404) killed us....

my recommendation - keep all your old URLs with the old content and let them fade away over time... it really really hurt us. Business almost folded...

[weteo]

> [example.com...]
> wouldn't be any different than
> [example.com...]
> would it?

Yes, it is different. "-" acts as a separator, and uri is also indexed.

So you get points for "united", "states" and "orlando" keywords if you use separator.

"_" is not separator, you will get points only for "united" and "states_orlando" keywords.

But who on the earth will ever search for "states_orlando"

[atadams]

You're right, my mistake...

[Brett_Tabke]

Also, the dash character is legal in the domain name. If a search engine wants to parse of dashed domain names, they might also look at dashed filenames. I've always felt it was safer to use the underline char for that reason.