I've noticed after changing the URLs of my content pages frequently my rankings dropped probably because of those 404 errors, is it possible for the rankings to recover because of this? (i'm talking about homepage)
You don't want to change urls very often. You can do 301 redirects, but it takes a while for the search engines to forward the juice to the new page.
Well stated. You can also request those previous URLs to be removed in the Google Webmaster tools section, but this seems to take a long time. I've found that it can take months to recover. I would suggest submitting the most current sitemap to Google too, so the spiders can more easily find the new pages. Edit: A question is; does your link building campaign point to the old pages? If so, do a 301 to those new pages, especially for the main page. Keep building links to the new addresses and you'll probably find things return to normal a little faster. The other good news is that the next update will likely be happening soon.
No all the links point to the main page, i kept changing the content pages. I'm thinking about re-uploading all the old files, this way google doesn't see a 404 error. My main site fell for all keywords, so changing the 100s of content URLS must've caused penalty to the whole site. My solution is to re-upload all the files, somehow. Should I upload blank files? Or should they be the same? I dont need the old files/urls anymore.
yes, consider a good 2 months of bad results after changing the url structure or the title tag structure
The recovery takes time as much as the old page gained its PR or got indexed. I would recommend that you should not change URL. Instead, just keep adding new pages. It's better to leave the existing ones.
Create 301 redirection now! This will shorten you recovery time as search engines are probably still visiting your broken URLs in hope to find your pages, make it easier for them and create redirections.
Is there another way to redirect without .htaccess? BEcause i have hundreds of files i need redirected, which i think is too much for .htaccess
Im pretty sure .htaccess is your best bet, plus there really isn't a reason for it to be "too much" for it.
the problem with that is i have thousands of links i need changed, like 342.html > snowman.html 523.html > christmas.html... etc it might slow the server too much or cause problems i think.
But if you don't use the 301, it will just make you lose your position in search engines, and then you will hardly get any traffic or anything like that from search engines. All the hard work you spent on getting it up anywhere, will go down the drain. Trust me, you're better off adding an htacess file in there. It won't affect your server too much.
are you sure it wont? i mean thousands of 334.html > snowman.html 342.html > harrypotter.html, etc anyone else?
You can also try .php, it might lower the stress on the apache. Read this page for a little info about it: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001714.shtml
I still haven't gotten a response about creating the old pages again, you see i dont have many deep links to these pages, i'm only worried about the 404 errors. The only links to those pages were from the home page. Only my homepage rankings dropped. Thanks to the responses above though.
Is it possible to have a wild card and redirect all pages like 342.html to a specific page? In other words, an entire range of pages to a specific page? Otherwise, I know that, with a current sitemap, Google will slowly filter those pages out. So far I haven't take a hit from Google after making big changes to the URL structure on almost all of our pages to being search engine friendly. I think the Google sitemap was the biggest factor in helping.
wouldn't google filter pages out anyways when they see a 404? A sitemap only helps getting new pages indexed i think