Google Penalty and drop in SERP

Here's another thought. If my site.com/index.html was messy, with bad html, would that drag down results for the whole site -- including deeper pages?

I am going to also clean upper deeper pages, but I wonder what the impact of getting the homepage clean will be. Hmmmm.
FB

 

Cleaning up your HTML will certainly help, though how much I can't say. Search engine bots may struggle to parse the bad HTML, and might also attribute poor coding with low quality content. Avoid nested tables if you can.

As for your php bookstore, if you have any inbound links to those pages or if you get any traffic to them, then you will want to redirect to your website's index page, or to a different page if it's more relevant. If you want to get clever, you could create a special landing page for that redirect. Google will eventually drop the 404 errors and 301 redirects from their index. Redirects will ensure that any PageRank your bookstore had will have a chance of being transferred to your main page.

On the subject of index pages, are you using "www.fornobravo.com/" or "www.fornobravo.com/index.html"? You should make a point of using only one form for all of your internal links as well as your inbound links. Search engines will see these as two seperate pages, and the PageRank will be split between them. Linking to "/" is usually preferred, and you can use a 301 redirect from one to the other .

Cryo.

 

Thanks Cryo,

Can you use an anchor with mysite.com/? I have a good anchor at mysite.com/index.html#anchor that I link to internally.

Can I use mysite.com/#anchor?

Or, do I use .com/, and dump the anchor?

Also, what is the .htaccess code for redirecting /index.html to /.

I already redirect mysite to www.mysite and posted that to Google webmaster tools.

Thanks again!
FB

 

Will this do it for a permanent redirect from the old bookstore pages?

RedirectMatch /cookbooks/(.*)\.html$ mysite.com/ (I cannot post URLs yet, so I dropped the http://www..)

FB

 

301 or 302...or reinstall...the error pages sound like your main concern as they affect the quality of google's serps in that the searchers don't get what they were looking for and it costs them extra clicks, time & frustration...gooogle's main concern is the purity of their serps....messing with their end users' experience is TROUBLE

 

I think this might count as a beginner's error. I just checked my Google webmaster tools, and they have come up with a whole series of new 404 errors. Looking at it, I can see that I moved a few folders around to make the site more managable and to set it up for some new content, and never did the 301 redirect. So, there are quite a few errors for pages that Google had indexed and are not longer there. I have gone back and done those redirects, but I can see that I didn't make the SEs happy with the changes.

I'm not sure how much of my fall is the result of this mistake -- but some of SERPs we have lost might just be pages that were moved and have not been found.

Live and learn.
FB