renaming pages- worth while?

I've got a bunch of pages that use abbreviations and odd shortcuts. sometimes these help to get hits- but rarely, it seems like.

should I rename them to optimize them for the future, despite the huge dip in traffic that could cause in the meantime?

1) people would be send to "dead end" pages when they come from google
2) google may take a long while to pick up these new pages

 

Short answer YES
Long answer YES with redirects from the old pages - Understand? - You make new pages and replace the old with a permanent redirect to the new.

Google will take as long as it takes electronically to go from the old to the new and back and reg the new

 

eh, I'd say its not really necessary. certainly in creating new pages its a good idea but from what i've been able to tell the benefit is really not that great. keep in mind that if you rename pages too there may be a couple of months where your new pages have no PR... i think its helpful certainly but only a very small bit - i've seen many a case where its not at all necessary.

 

Ive done it with a few of my pages, I left the old page up with a link to the new page, lazy I know, but its worked and these pages haven't seen reduced level because of it.

Darren

 

Well in my book if Google allows you to see

allinurl
allinanchor
allintext

I would make sure that these criteria are satisfied.

 

According to the test by EdSolutions it seems worthwile to me (early days though).

http://www.edsolutions.ca/seo-google-test-results-09-05-2004.html

File name comes 2nd in one page SEO after Title tag in their results.

 

I just moved some files on my siteinto a folder, but it was more of an organization thing. I realized my newsletter archives were simply getting too big to be sitting in with everything else. Popped in some redirects to keep the search engine and any bookmarks going to the right pages, now I just have to wait for them to get Page Rank back, for what little that really matters.

 

Many of these posts lead me to believe that the stunning power of the .htaccess file and mod_rewrite remain occult knowledge. If you're serious about SEO, you should certainly be on a host running on Apache. And if you're serious about SEO and you're on a host running Apache, you have got to know about your .htaccess file and all the things you can do through it, including page redirects. The mod_rewrite feature uses "regular expressions", so you can generally relocate huge numbers of pages with one or a few lines in .htaccess.

 

Right on Owlcroft - and this thread has moved up another level - as is typical of this forum.

So let me take my answer one level up as well.

If you go and do a search on Google eg for Weber BBQs [it is not competitive btw] you will find that the first is

and all the "Weber" are in bold including the url meaning Google "sees" these.

No 3 + No 4 is this forum [because of my signature] and the No3 illustrates the importance of the tiltle [that is thread subject] and the following other text, as does No4, and the importance of "allintext:"

Now if you go to McDars tool http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php and do a search on "Weber bbqs" using the "allin" button you will see that we are

43 for "weber bbqs
1+2 for allintext
1+2 for allinanchor
3 for all in url - With a different page - one that has the weber bbqs in the url! It was also added 2 weeks after the other pages

Now as we are in the "sandboxed" stage we have to wait for the normal search to get to the top.

Enough proof that url matters?

 

Actually further to that let me explain on another planet.....hehe

I was known as FoxyWeb but when I found out that my name had been hijacked by porn sites and others I changed it to z+2 and registered the site www.zplus2.com which I launched on Sunday 31st May.

It was crawled by Google, MSN and WWWW on the same day and Google has been back already yesterday.

Now go and do a search on "zplus2"

Need I say more? Don't think so!

 

Ive found filenames to be very beneficial. Id suggest if you have time to do it.

http://www.princetonsoftwarecompany.com provides software for bulk renaming... found the link in the adwords (perhaps click the link in ads for shawn's sake

 

I'm happy with my filenames but I used underscores rather than hyphens. Is it people's opinions still, that hyphens are preferred? I have gone through the change with a couple of sites and put in 301 redirects, just wondering if I should do it with the others?

One downside is then requesting link exchanges I have to explain why many of the pages show zero PR. People (including me) tend to get nervous when looking at a site that has been up for a while and many of the pages show zero PR. There's enough shifty people out there and people tend to assume the worst until they are better informed.

 

I'd like to know if this is true. Specially the sentence marked in red.

 

I have a couple of pages that have space instead of hyphens. They are only 1 month old, but have been indexed. Is it a good idea to re-name the pages? Will I get penalized by the search engines for the old pages?

 

r

"Some SEs don't like redirects ..." SEOgeek.com

 

its not worth the trouble to rename pages

 

I would not rename the pages if they are ranking anywhere, by changing the name your breaking the connection you already have. I would create new pages and start Seoing your new pages till they are bigger then the old. Be sure to link the old pages to the new pages to get some of that old link value. FYI