Question about robots.txt and my site

[phi148]

Hi all... hopefully this is an easy question for you all

I run an online store, and it used to be located here:

www.mysite.com/shop/

Well... I recently moved it to the root:

www.mysite.com/

SO... even though google & yahoo have cached links at /shop/ I was wondering, should I now add /shop/ to my robots.txt file since it no longer exists?

Thanks!

[jdMorgan]

No, you should redirect every URL in /shop to it's equivalent or replacement, or, lacking a sensible replacement, to its category page in the new URL-scheme. Had you asked this question before changing your site, I (and likely others) would have advised you not to change your URLs at all, since this can affect your pages' rankings (and therefore your revenue) for several months or even years.

Changing URLs sacrifices all incoming links, page rank, and link-popularity of those URLs. Some or most of this can be recovered by using a 301-Moved Permanently redirect, but understand that this redirect adds an extra step to the search spider's job, and thus can lead to less-than-perfect transfer of 'credit' from old to new URLs.

Bottom line is never, ever change a URL [w3.org], unless forced by litigation (for example, trademark infringement) to do so.

Having done so, however, it's not advisable to change them back, either. Plan your new URL-scheme carefully (as discussed in the cited article) so that you'll never have to change it again.

Jim