Taken from: http://code.mincus.com/10/url-schema-change-effect-on-unique-hits/ Earlier this month I made many changes to the structure of one of my websites as a test. The result has been that my daily unique hits have increased to 125% of the normal numbers. Now, it could just be a fluke and maybe it will all drop back down again, but the site had been pretty steady at that number for about a year now without much fluctuation. It could also have just coincided with a change in a search engine algorithm. That said, below is the list of changes that I made. Changed URLS from 'index.cgi?[0-9]+' to '/[0-9]+/Full-Title-With-Spaces-Replaced-With-Dashes/ Used mod_rewrite to redirect old URL schema to new with 301 redirects Put unique title words in meta keywords for each page Started adding relevant unique images with the same name as the title, linked to the full version of the image with the same title. Format: '/image/[0-9]+/Page-Title-[0-9]+.jpg' User posted comments with links are automatically 'rel="nofollow"' now</li> Switched from a table based layout to full CSS (cut the average page size by one half without counting caching the css file) Validated all pages with the w3c validator Started asking one site a day to cross-link Stats below: The line marked in red is the day that I made the change over. Notice that the bandwidth initially went down from cutting the size of the pages, but then passed the old baseline when the new hits started coming in. There was a _slight_ drop in my hits for the first few days after, but after about two weeks it really started taking off. My guess is that it really upped my ranking for periphery keywords. Also, the majority of my search engine traffic used to come from only Google (around 80%). But now Yahoo, MSN and the rest have been spidering the site like crazy (Yahoo alone has about 1/2 a gig of transferred data since the change) and the visitors sent by them is really starting to increase. I guess that those search engines really didnt like the old URL schema. One last note is that the site has thousands of pages of unique real data. It has always been a solid site, but I just didnt put much thought into the design and layout of the URL schema before. Now it seems that it is getting the recognition from the search engines that it could have had all along. Hope this helps someone else; feel free to add more suggestions! Next I'll talk about the effect that it had on my Adsense Revenue.
Thanks! My understanding of using the rel="nofollow", is that it allows you to link to external sites without losing any of your weight from the search engines. Some one else might want to clarify this further though.
Link to other sites won't lower your weight. Only affects to PR to linked sites. For you, there's no difference.
Yep, sorry, I meant PR. This way people can post links and I don't have to moderate every single thing that comes across.