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SEO question
This is not a question related to TXP per se, so I post here. I have a niche site which I am currently upgrading. In the process, I am thinking of making two changes but wanted to check with the SEO experts here (I am not one of them!).
- I am thinking of changing the domain name to something more descriptive of the site content. At the moment the name is general/silly, but for the important search terms the site ranks #1 or #2 in Google. Will changing the name have a big impact?
- I am thinking of changing the URL structure – from /section/id/title to /id/title. The section name IS descriptive of the site’s function, but the URL becomes long, and I think /id/title is better. Will changing the URL structure have a big impact on page rank?
Thanks for any help…
Last edited by jstubbs (2009-08-18 12:35:06)
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Re: SEO question
Don’t fprget about 301 Redirect – old urls and old domain name should point to theirs new urls. If you don’t have thousands of articles, you can build your list be <txp:article_custom limit=“9999” form=“301_redirect”/> and place in this form links to articles, categories and others – this will help you to build the list of redirects.
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Re: SEO question
Jonathan,
1. Use an .htaccess redirect to point to the new domain.
2. Use Redirect Pro from Zem to seamlessly handle the URL structure changes.
Will it impact rankings? Maybe, maybe not, hard question to answer since Google is changing their algorithms and Bing is on a tear, so it might be a good time to make this kind of change.
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Re: SEO question
From own experience: Changing a domain name caused a traffic dip of about 30 per cent for approx. six months (with proper 301 mapping of old and new URIs in effect).
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Re: SEO question
Thanks for the feedback. So – its not a good idea to change the domain name unless one could expect more traffic as a result.
The current site has articles that expire between 1-6 months after posting. Most are 1-2 months. No point in mapping those articles I think. Or am I wrong?
redirect_pro is not available anymore. Is that the best method if one were to choose 301 redirects?
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#6 2009-08-18 17:38:56
- els
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Re: SEO question
jstubbs wrote:
redirect_pro is not available anymore.
Someone who has it can send it to you :) It just comes without documentation.
Is that the best method if one were to choose 301 redirects?
redirect_pro is great when you change your URL scheme, you can also do that in .htaccess but I guess you’ll need regular expressions to handle all your article URLs. redirect_pro just does it for you.
(edited, I wasn’t being very clear I’m afraid…)
Last edited by els (2009-08-18 17:43:31)
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Re: SEO question
jstubbs wrote:
The current site has articles that expire between 1-6 months after posting. Most are 1-2 months. No point in mapping those articles I think. Or am I wrong?
If most articles expire in 1 to 2 months, then why even bother trying to redirect them to the new scheme. You must have a lot of 404 errors in your Apache logs I would presume, so the search engines are accustomed to following dead links by now.
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Re: SEO question
Yes that’s what I thought. No point in worrying about redirects. But have to consider changing the URL structure and domain name.
404’s – yes have 1412 hits this month alone, but lot of those are for weird url’s that don’t exist on the site. Also 419 hits on 301 redirects, interestingly.
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Re: SEO question
Mmm. On further investigation, most of the 404’s are for robots.txt. Is this a required file? I remember it was there on my previous host, but the file is not there on my current host, Joyent.
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Re: SEO question
jstubbs wrote:
On further investigation, most of the 404’s are for robots.txt. Is this a required file?
This is my robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /textpattern/Every search engine looks for this before spidering your site.
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Re: SEO question
On my other host I seem to remember the robots.txt file was blank. Nothing on Joyent, which is strange.
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Re: SEO question
I just read “Building Findable Website” by Aaron Walter – highly recommended by the way. One thing I picked up was that urls are a great place to have keywords. So something descriptive in the url, as you mentioned the current scheme is, may be better for SEO than using article id’s. Check out that book though, it’s really good.
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