Hi, I want to know if changing http://www.flunkme.com/blog/ to http://www.flunkme.com/college-guide/ would make any significant difference? I will also have to change all links etc. would u recommend doing this?
If you do that, you will lose all your rankings with the Search Engines for some time or permanently depending on a few preconditions. (1) You redirect everything to its new page in the new folder of the blog using a 301 permanent redirect. For example flunkme.com/blog/hello-world would go to flunkme.com/blog/hello-world (2) You don't redirect anything but the home page If you do method 1. you'll lose the rankings for a short period (20-25 days) and they'll slowly get back up, however if you use method 2. you will lose the rankings for a long time until the Search Engines finally pick up your new pages. The most recommended method is 1. I will recommend doing this only if you want to rank for College Guide, and maybe thats why you are doing this. Its not recommended if you are looking to gain any immediate boost, expect anything beneficial only after two months or so. IT
okay I won't mess with it... one more question - will my blog rank high for keyword if some of the articles are 7 directory deep? I'm trying to make very user friendly link, so I have allot of sub dirs that pinpoint the topic of the article, is this a good practice? I heard google won't spider or rank 4 dirs deep. And one more, when u say you will loose all ranking - I'm also considering optimizing my free essay script to use mod rewrite on all urls and subcats just like on blog. Does that mean google won't pick it up?
I think http://blog.flunkme.com/colledge-guide/ will be better. It both tell visitors that it's a blog, and also tell visitors what's the blog is.
IMHO, it does make a difference in that it referees the spiders to the keyword you are targeting over and over again.
Hi, my blod doesn't have any significant ranking yet... so what do u mean under loosing ranking? google won't reindex? only ten pages of blog indexed and blog is relatively new. I did submit it to technorati etc, but I can always change links right? what if I just redirect blog/ -> college-guide/ ? without targeting each article? will that be of a trouble for google?
Well if the site is relatively new and has not many links, indexed pages, PR and such then you could make the change right away because there wont be a big problem right now. Try and redirect each existing page to its new page, that helps the search engines, but if the website is very new, then... I think you can survive with directing just the folder. IT
Actually Google has stopped paying attention to domain names for their ranking criteria. So it doesn't make a difference which domain name u pick. So the one which is best suited for your visitors pick that one. And if the change is not that necessary then its better not to get into all that.
I m not agree with u.google is still giving some weight to your domain name.if google stop giving weight than why people buying domain with targeted keywords. where did u read that?? can give me the link? and if your site is new and u want to give that name than go ahead just resubmit google sitemap so it will crawl those pages.
okay! now I made this very neat redirect using htaccess... so that every file is redirected. for example: http://www.flunkme.com/blog/about/ is redirected to http://www.flunkme.com/college-guide/about/ and so on! I didn't loose any of the pages. So what do you guyz think about this? and this is what I put into htaccess file this is extremely useful when moving whole directory without changing actuall file names. so now every old file is mapped to the new file. Would this cause any trouble with google? what do u think?
You can do it that way, but like my URL 3dgamics.com/forum I redirected to bzimage.org and I useda php script, I can upload it for you if you want to try that.
thx, I think I will stick to htaccess redirect it was recommended on several seo blogs. looks like this now: Redirect 301 /blog http://www.flunkme.com/college-guide