Does it matter for SEO? Is it better to have "keyword1-keyword2.php" or "keyword1_keyword2.php". Has anyone tried both and gotten different results? Ian
I have seen a couple of tests where the dash is the better results. THe underscore sometimes is considered as part of the word or such but the dash is a definite divider. I have a couple of underscored filenames that rank well as the search terms but they are not very competitive searches. All the rest are dashes.
i say use hyphens 2 as underscores can sometimes go unnoticed and be mistaken for a blank space which would obviously cause a 404 error
The programs mentioned here will work. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=16869&highlight=rename
Lot's of useful tools here, thanks for the help. Now I only have to: A) Wait for the next deep crawl from Google (that seems to be very infrequent so who knows when the next time that will happen will be) B) Wait for the next deep crawl from MSN (which seems even more infrequent, how often do they come back around anyway?) C) Wait for Yahoo to crawl me (They grabbed two pages initially, then have since dropped one, and now they haven't come back in weeks. Any thoughts?) C) Wait until Google lets me out of the apparent Sandbox. I'm getting very limited traffic right now from vague searches, although I've gotten some visitors. I just think it stinks that they feel the need to bury you early on. Hopefully like many of you have said we hit the ground running when it's over Ian
Wow, I wonder how I got negative rep for my posts in this topic? Someone prefers the word "dash" to the word "hyphen"? Someone thinks I should magically know whether the poster is using Unix or DOS? Eeerie.
What about dashes in url? ( example: aaa-bbb.com ) Does that hurt my possible ranking in search engines ?
No, it doesnt hurt, but-it-can-look-a-little-unprofessional-sometimes-depending-on-how-long-the-name-is. I dont think you can use underscore in a domain.- not sure, never would anyway The SEs can break down asingledomain into its parts. so the difference between a-domain.com and adomain.com are very little. Especially if you are going to have the site longterm anyway.
If google already indexed the files. Dont rename them because then u will have to do 301 redirect and u will loose ranking.
Have to agree with City2, if your files are all indexed and you rename them, you're essentially starting over from scratch in the search engines' eyes, not only will you lose rank but all pages cached by the engines will return 404 when clicked, unless you redirect all!
The primary thing I've done for now was just renaming the images. The html pages didn't change. I'm going to leave two copies available until the next crawl. I've changed all the img tags on the site to point to the photos, while leaving the old ones in place for the current pages that they have in the system. When it crawls it again it should grab the new images and then I can go in and delete the old ones. Does that make sense? Regarding the ranking, the site is relatively new (about a month and a half) and had a pagerank of 0 prior to the apocolypse that occurred this weekend, so I guess I wasn't too concerned about the rank of the pages since I assumed there wasn't one. Ian
Makes sense to me Ian... Pages I have renamed in that fashion, I typically leave up for a period of 4 - 6 weeks, because of the indexed links pointed at those pages. That seems to be about what it takes the search engines to purge them from their system. Except of course, Yahoo!... it takes them that long to find the changed page!! (o;?
if you want Yahoo bots to arrive quickly try this Yahoo technique it really, really works. Be sure to include your site map in the blog.
mod_rewrite should do the trick. Plus your files still exist for anyone linking to them or finding them before search engines update.