Hello guys, Here is the thing, I've set up a new website: http://www.butterflymarketingscam.com which I've actually yet to finish, I've been busy with other things but added some content anyway to get it going first. First thing, I registered the domain and uploaded the site about 1.5 months ago, created a link on my other PR 4(www.richjerkscams.com) site to www.butterflymarketingscam.com. Ok, great, within a few days there I was in page 17, thats nice and rather expected since competition is rather weak. Then I think I did a interesting thing right, I decided to change all the filenames in the site from "_" to "-", eg. "butter_fly" to "butter-fly". I read somewhere that "-" is better so I thought I would just try it out. I did and my ranking in google dissapeared! Now for the last 20 odd days its been stuck in position 620++! The thing is, I know I have sufficient links to rank much higher and I'm possibly penalized by google for some reason or another. Could some of you experts shed some light on the situation? I've already checked if I'm linking to any banned pages and I'm not! How How How?? Just FYI, I've been stuck on MSN position No.5 which is quite nice. My problem is with google which doesn't seem to like my site. I accepted that can't rank with yahoo since I'm with Adsense.
Matt Cutts said that '-' is better but common sense says it couldn't be that much better. Changing file names is always a bad idea IMO. Better to just start using a new naming convention you like, and leave old pages alone.
Yes, use a redirect in .htaccess That way spiders wont get a 404 if they go looking for the old files and you'll avoid dupe content issues. Since the site is still new and under developement, dont worry about the drop in rankings. It may have nothing to do with the file name changes. Could just be sanbox issues. Keep bulding and then once the site is ready, start getting backlinks. Google bot will then start to find links to your site and give it a thourough crawl seeing all the new file names. And eventually it will be as though those old files never existed.