I changed a site from mainli static to mainly database fed. the result was a drop to 20% visitors , i waited for it to settle, dumbly, and before i new it i dropped a page rank with google. I have since looked at mod_rewrite and have changed so ie mysite/villa.php?id=link can be accessed by mysite/link.html before i change the links is it a worth while in you opinion re se indexing or is it just smoke and mirrors, and will make no difference?
i am not getting exactly what u mean to ask.. here i am giving reply as per my understanding. i think u have edit url name and did not rewrite url from old to new, due to it u lost pr and ranking right? now u cant do anything with this but i advise you to rewrite old url to new one, still it might help to gain traffic.
If the site is indexed fine to begin with, reindexing with new page names won't make much difference. I would only change the url structure if Google etc have been unable to crawl your site for whatever reason.
thanks for the responses. my actual pages now are ie mysite/villa.php?id=link Code (markup): by using mod re write the same pages can be accessed by mysite/link.html Code (markup): same page but different appearance as a link. i am comitted to trying now so i will see what happens just wanted to ask if anyone had some experience with this before i made further changes
i'd first check if the bulk of your visitors are referred through the search engines. if they are then i'd say your move from static to database-driven would have caused a drop in visitor volume and i'd go mod_rewrite the site to make it easier to index. however, if your visitors are coming for other sources, the drop may not be cause by your change.
i'd first check if the bulk of your visitors are referred through the search engines. if they are then i'd say your move from static to database-driven would have caused a drop in visitor volume and i'd go mod_rewrite the site to make it easier to index. however, if your visitors are coming for other sources, the drop may not be cause by your change. Code (markup): thanks for that , it sounds logical
Meaningful non duplicate url names are very important. Those long string names show up as dupes. ModRewrite wil; help Best
As I understand it you rewrote the links at some point and saw a drop in visitors which is understandable, since to the best of my knowledge Google now sees site/page.html as a completely different page from site?id=page - you lose the pagerank associated with that page and of course the page disappears from Google's index for a while since Google tries to find the old link and probably gets a 404 error, and decides that the page no longer exists. Unless you did a "permanent redirect" (is it 301 or 302, can't remember offhand?) for those links. If not you have to wait for Google to reindex the whole site, and there is no guarantee that you will have the same placings. I am also thinking about doing this as I have some "semi-SEF" links which I want to improve, but I realise that once I do that all my old pages will drop out of the Google's index - I can't do a permanent redirect, it's just too complicated. So I am wondering if it's worth dropping out of the search engine results for a while for what might be a very minor gain... If you're gonna do it, I guess sooner is rather than later, so I am figuring I probably WON'T do it... I will work on other forms of SEO, because that's not the ONLY one by a long way...
Just 301 redirect the old URLs to the modded URLs, that simple. They will transfer over their value in a small period of time, you may see a small drop in search results, but it will return shortly afterwards.
ok i will go with mod rewrite then . as i see it the pages blahblah.php?xxx will not need 301 redirect as thy can still be accessed by that url ,but links on the pages will read more friendly. im guessing this wont be seen as duplicates by search engines then.
Ooo.. I dunno - I am pretty sure that counts for duplicate content - it means Google can get to page X via blahblah.php?xxx AND via blahblah.php/xxx and will see no reason to treat them as the same page, hence they will be regarded as duplicate content. Can't swear to that, but I am pretty sure. That's why you DO the redirect, so the old page gets obliterated.