Here's the thing -- I started this blog of mine (StreetLessons.com) in december last year. I grew more virally (like most blogs) and has some SE rankings for some pages. My Initial page structure was streetlessons.com/post-id/post-title/. Do you think that a page structure like streetlessons.com/post-id-post-title.html would be better than the original structure? This site is now about 6-7 months old.. Do you think I can actually switch the structure without screwing it up? If yes, what kind of re-direct should I make it?
Just change to streetlessons.com/%year%/%postname%.html It helps very well. Nothing will be screwed up i hope. I changed it in my 2 months old blog with many posts and all were well changed without any problems.
I think his question is more as to whether it will screw up the rankings. And the answer is yes, very probably. If you do decide to change, you'd want to put up 301's to redirect, but google (as well as other search engines) are notoriously bad at dealing with 301's. So unless you want to take a nice hit (and code a ton of 301 pages by hand), I'd say don't bother. There's really no reason to change the structure anyway.
Spot on bro! Just what I wanted to ask. I guess I can live with /id/post-title. BTW another question... going to /id/ shows the same content as /id/post-title. However, nowhere it is linked to without the /post-title/ part. Can it still create duplicate content?
I don't think Google will treat same content on one site as duplicate content: There will be more ways to access the same content via different urls (think of tag-pages)
Even if /id/ does that, I assume there aren't links to /id/ so google will never see those pages. If there are links to /id/ instead of /id/post-title then change those links to /id/post-title. Either way, you're in the clear. Happy webbing!
How can you say that 301 redirect is bad for search engines. Well this the only redirect that is treated good. It not only passes traffic but also passes Page Rank too... Well on to the next question if you really want to change them just do that... if you rank for them now... then you will rank for them in few days too... no problem with that... Take care Manish
Manish, I've heard horror stories of people trying to change their site structure with 301's and it taking months to get properly reindexed, sometimes not even then (especially if the tradeover was happening over bigdaddy). Better not to risk it if there's no real gain.