Hi, I've wanted to change the page names on my site to be relevant to keywords but didn't want to loose the page ranks I had. now I know about the 301 redirect and want to get going but hit a stumbling block. my pages are all about t-nuts and t-nut machines of different styles. The key words I'm aiming for are "t-nuts" and "t-nut machines" my main t-nut page is t-nut.html - fine but what about the sub pages? if I name it t-nuts ultragrip.html for example is that better than t-nuts_ultragrip.html for the keyword thing? I'm just thinking that in the browsers the first option would show up with the %20 thing in place of the space but I don't know if the underscore is read by the engines as a space or a weird word. I hope someone can figure out what I'm talking about because I'm not feeling like I'm being very clear. any advice would be appreciated! Thanks Lisa http://www.sigmatool.com
I thought that a hyphen as opposed to an underscore worked better because Google was supposed to read the hyphenated name as seperate words. I find that hyphens do work well on my own site and others I work on so IMHO I´d go for t-nuts-ultragrip.
I'm wondering if using the key word in directory names would be more effective... for example http://www.sigmatool.com/tnuts/t-nuts.html http://www.sigmatool.com/tnuts/ultragrip.html http://www.sigmatool.com/tnuts/torqloc.html http://www.sigmatool.com/tnut-machines/machines.html http://www.sigmatool.com/tnut-machines/drill-drive.html http://www.sigmatool.com/tnut-machines/hopper-fed.html Do search engines take that part of the address into consideration? Lisa
1. definitely hyphens, not underscores or spaces 2. I think the directory name and the filename probably have equal value as far as SEs are concerned -- suggest you make the decision on the criterion of which looks less spammy -- I would say that more than a maximum of three keywords in a filename is overdoing it.
if you change the page names, I have found that leaving the old pages alone and simply creating new ones will not hurt my goog rating. An example I might have page.html and page_seo.html both with the sam content. the only differenc is that page_seo.html id now linked to the home page and page.html is left alone so users will navigate back into the ain structure.
But then one of the pages will lose out to the duplicate content filter... and maybe not the one you want.
I created the .htaccess file for renaming pages and everything was going swimmingly until I tried to change a page that was called furniture clips.htm to furniture-clips.htm. That change brought down the whole site!! so I figured it was the space in the name and tried furniture20%clips.htm to...... but that just didn't work. Now I'm left with the links on my site going to furniture-clips.htm and a copy of that page with the original name for the search engine hits. does anyone know a workaround for this problem - I have a couple of other pages with spaces in the names that I want to change. TIA Lisa Sigma