i guess this is a fairly common problem. i need to figure out how to get Googs to drop one set of pages and pick up another, without losing traffic for an extended period of time. i started off with mostly dynamic URL's. www.mysite.com/cms.pl?a=lot&of=values&and=parameters www.mysite.com/cms.pl?blab=%SUO4%ETC%ETC%ETC Code (markup): then, for various reasons - rankings, sitemaps, etc. - i enabled the following using the rewrite rule in .htaccess www.mysite.com/keyword_and_more_keywords www.mysite.com/love_me_google_please Code (markup): i figured this would shoot me to the top of the serps and i was snug as a bug. but.... it turns out google figured out that the new SEOed url's have the same content as the dynamic ones, but are newer, which makes them duplicate content, so the dynamic ones remain in the SERPs, whereas the SEO-friendly ones are in the supplemental results. EVEN THOUGH my sitemap contains only the SEOed urls and no dynamic URL's. what now? 1. totally disable the dynamic ones so that these return a 404 2. if the request is for the dynamic url, insert "NO FOLLOW NO INDEX NO ARCHIVE" meta tag 3. wait very patiently 4. any ideas people? nick # i'd appreciate advice from grunts and peons, please,
You need to set a 301 directive in .htaccess to redirect your query string URL's to your new ones. Also you really should of used dashes as seperators instead of underscores.
i see... ok that makes sense. funny i never considered this because my .htaccess is chockfull of jury rigged junk to make the seo'd urls work in the first place. thanks. NOW you tell me. hehe. well actually some people recommend dashes others swear by underscores, as far as i can tell there's not much difference as far as big G is concerned, and the wikipedia seems to be doing fine with underscores, so i went with underscores.
Yes definately 301 all old URL's to the new ones, it will pass all link juice over to the new ones, as well as redirect bots and visitors and avoid any duplicate content issues. With the underscores in URL's Google ignores them so Google will see i_love_google.html as ilovegoogle however dashes are treated as a seperator. Or the underscored URL's would only come in to play if the user searches with an underscore in the query. http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/ Not only that, underscores look like spaces to the user when hyperlinked. Example: http://www.domain.com/i_love_google.html Not to mention it's 2 keys to type an underscore, instead of 1 for a dash. Wiki does good because of the content rich pages, and massive backlinks.
hey dude; supplemental results is not related with the url structure. having dynamic or static urls will not effect your supplemental results. the main criteria for supplemental results is PAGE RANK. you need more backlinks to get out them from supplemental results
Sorry, but you will thank me for it in the long run. You are commiting SERP suicide by not 301ing your old URL's, and using underscores.