Mod Rewrite implementation / SEO.

I am about to go on a journey which will either ruin or greatly improve my websites ranking in the search engines.

I currently have a dynamic website and an example of the URL would be;

/widgets/widgets.php?id=blue and I want to make the URL /widgets/blue.html

I have the .htaccess and mod rewrite code in place and want to implement it on my website, but I am not sure what process I should follow to make sure the implementation is successful.

The current dynamic pages are listed in the search engines, but don't bring much traffic, so the fact that I am changing the URL isn't a major problem, other than I don't want to get penalised by Google etc for dup content.

What process should I follow?

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Darren

 

If you've already figured out your rewrite rules, then you just need to put them in place on your website. I'm assuming that you've got two sets of rules; first to create the new URLs, second to redirect the old URLs to the new ones. Redirects should be permanent 301 redirects. Make sure you change all of your internal links to the new form as well.

Cryo.

 

Actually, I had not thought about the redirect the old URL's to the new ones, so thanks for mentioning that!

nstead I am thinking of removing all of the dynamic pages from google, and then implementing the mod rewrite but I am not sure if because I have removed the dynamic pages, that Google will index the new .html pages from the mod rewrite.

Confused - I am

 

There's no need to remove the old pages from Google. If you redirect your old pages to your new ones, Google will follow the links, and update it's index to point to the new pages. Any PageRank you have on your old pages should transfer across to your new ones. If you're worried about losing your position in the SERPs, you may want to consider doing groups of pages at a time, over several months.

Cryo.

 

I have done this before and with a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new pages it was all sorted in google within a few weeks. Make sure you update your google sitemap and leave the 301 redirects in place for ever.