greets to all here at DP. i have found a unimaginable wealth of information here and am very thankful for DP's existance. i do however have a question that i couldnt seem to find a anwser to. but i may just be over looking a past post, my apoligies if i am. i run a site using oscommerce, currently we have a bit over 7000 pages indexed by the big G. but as the site is constructed in OSC the urls are garbage. i am very interested in using mod_rewrite to make my urls a bit more search engine friendly. so heres my two questions; is it worth it? and secondly, if i use mod_rewrite am i going to loose my 7000+ indexed pages? thanks in advance.
Use Chemo's Ultimate SEO URLs. It includes fully automated 301 redirects from the old urls to the new (product_info.php to kw-n.html). If you don't rank that well, it might be a good idea but I wouldn't risk many #1's for it since the URL is such a small part of the algo.
If you have 7,000 indexed pages, why do you think they aren't search engine friendly? What possible improvement could you have by changing the URLS? You have a bigger chance of having this hurt you than causing any good
well, i guess i was interested in getting more of our keywords into the url. we do already hold top 5 on google for almost all of our keywords, we jsut cant seem to get to that blessed first posistion. i am just scared to loose it all. i am in the process of ripping out all of the unused garbage in osc and converting osc's tables to a css layout. do you guys think that slimming down the code will be more benificial ?
You are risking it too much by doing that... you could turn your site into pure spam. As Nintendo says, just keep things the way they are.
those were my worries as well. i read on some forums somewhere that it would help so i figured i would ask in a place where i could trust the anwser given.
one thing i am definatly not understanding is that my site has 7,380 pages indexed, 172 backlinks and a pr of 5 our competition has 12 pages indexed, 39 backlinks and a pr 4.... i am pulling my hair out over this. all logic states that my site should be ahead of theirs correct?
i was facing the same dilemma some time back with one of my sites where i had around 5,000 of my pages well indexed and ranking well...i did a mod rewrite for them and also had all prior urls 301 redirected to these new urls just in case...so far it hasn't had any adverse impact on rankings but time will tell...it's only been a couple of weeks since i've implemented these changes
"one thing i am definatly not understanding is that my site has 7,380 pages indexed, 172 backlinks and a pr of 5 our competition has 12 pages indexed, 39 backlinks and a pr 4.... i am pulling my hair out over this. all logic states that my site should be ahead of theirs correct?" No. You have to analyze where the BL are coming from. Some may worth more than others for your targeted keywords. Also, don't forget there is still something called Onpage Optimization
wow... i think you have a lot to loose by trying to change... If I were you I would just set up a clone for the store with the mod_rewrite
If the new urls are a significant improvement over the old ones and you believe that in the long-run you are likely to rip the benefits from the change, I'd go with mod_rewrite + perm redirect (301). I did this recently on one of my busy sites and so far so good. I hated the old url structure enough to go for it!
i dont think you'd suffer from a dup. content penalty if you did a permanent redirect of the old urls to the new ones
ok I thought about this a little more and my better answer is... who cares about the links and stuff... Are you making any money? I mean mod_rewrite is the better option but whatever money you are making now from search engine traffic you should prepare yourself to loose that and perhaps never regain. BUT if your currently getting most of your traffic through word of mouth or name recognition and not through search engines then by all means do it.
dcristo: checking backlinks using links:http://website.com/ at goo stimpsy: the onpage seo seems to be much better than our competiton's, and almost all the backlinks are content related, and not just realted to the page on their link directory, but also the overall subject of the website as well. shoemoney: about 50% percent of our traffic comes from google, 30 from yahoo, and about 5 from msn. and we make decent money but i just feel it should be a bit better.
Google has been inaccurate displaying backlinks for some time now. You can get a better indication using the linkdomain command on Yahoo.