Hello, I have had a website for 1 year and the names of the pages are not very good. For example I have a page WorldTickets.php and think it would be better as Round-the-world-tickets.php. However if i change the name of this file now the google index will have all the old file names stored and will be littered with broken links will it not? What should I do? Shall I change them all and change my sitemap. Leave it? How should one handle this problem? Thanks
This is exactly what a 301 Permanently Moved redirect is for. You need to implement a 301 Permanently Moved redirect to tell the search engines (and peoples browsers) that worldtickets.php has permanently moved to a new location at round-the-world-tickets.php. When a web browser requests a web page, the web server typically renders the HTML and returns it to the browser with a 200 Ok status to tell the browser it successfully found and rendered the HTML for the requested page. When you have a 301 redirect in place and a web browser requests a URL (for example, worldtickets.php) that has been redirected, the browser does not return the HTML for the old web page that has moved. Instead it returns a 301 Permanently Moved status AND the new location of the page (round-the-world-tickets.php). When the browser gets a 301 status code back instead of a 200, it finds the new location in the HTTP header... and then requests the new URL (round-the-world-tickets.php). Search engines treat 301 redirects very similarly. When a search engine requests a URL (worldtickets.php) and gets back a 301, they request the page at the new location (round-the-world-tickets.php). If the new page returns a 200 Ok status then they add the new URL to their index (if it's not already there) AND they transfer credit for that one inbound link to the old URL (worldtickets.php) over to the new URL (round-the-world-tickets.php). You can expect your rankings and traffic to drop for a while after placing a 301 redirect in place. Once every inbound link to the old URL has been recrawled, the 301 discovered for each inbound link to the old URL, and credit for the inbound link to the old URL transfered to to the new page's URL... your rankings will return. Depending on the number of inbound links to the old page and how often those sites that link to the old page get crawled, it can take anywhere from a few days... to a month or two before the new URL is ranking like the old one used to and all of your traffic returns. If your site is hosted on Apache (I'm guessing it is since your examples were .php pages) then you likely have access to Mod Rewrite which is a VERY robust and useful utility that can be used to implement redirects. It uses .htaccess files containing rules for doing redirects, URL rewriting, etc. For example, if both of the pages you mentioned above lived in the root of your web, you could add the following lines to the .htaccess file in the root to implement the redirects: PS: I would highly recommend ALWAYS naming your pages with ALL lowercase characters. Link to your own pages with all lowercase characters. When you implement redirects then redirect to URLs that use all lowercase characters.
Thank you very much. That is priceless information. I'm really pleased you explained that the credit the old inbound link had is transferred to the new URL. I was worried I was going to have to rebuild my page rank which takes ages. I have seen the .htaccess file lurking around my web server; now I know what it's for. I didn't really understand the syntax you provided for the redirect but I will do some googling on this 301 redirect. Again, MANY thanks
Do you think its advantageous to move my pages to a dashed structure naming scheme like round-the-world-tickets.php or is it more trouble than its worth? Blogs like blogger and wordpress name like this by default and some SEO sites really rate it.
Keyword rich URLs are a minor ranking factor. They don't carry as much weight as <title> does for instance, but in SEO it is rarely any one thing you do that will make a page rank (other than inbound links from relevant pages w/ the targeted keyword phrase or slight variations as the link text). Instead, successful SEO is usually the result of doing LOTS of little things. Taken individually, none have a noticable impact on rankings... But taken together, they improve your rankings. I'm not sure the example you gave would be worth the trouble. It would probably be one of the last on-page SEO changes I would make after I've optimized all other on-page elements. And I'd probably do it a a time when I'm already making global changes to the site like during a site redesign. Your time would likely be better spent farming links to worldtickets.php with the link text of "round the world tickets" (and slight variations). You see much more results in your rankings than simply implementing a keyword rich URL.
Thanks for all the advice!! Perhaps I will leave the file naming for now. Perhaps change one and see if it does have any impact and also test out the 301 redirect. Thanks again.