Need some info on this - Regarding Google Indexing Please!

[GAViN™©]

Our website is now starting to be noticed using keywords that we want, and a lot of pages are appearing on the first page
of google which is exactly what we want....

Up until now, all our "product pages" have had URL's like this for example:

www.******.co.uk/acatalog/pet1030.html

pet1030 being the product code for the product.

I am now creating the filenames for the html product pages in actinic so they will look like this for example:

www.****.co.uk/acatalog/philips-pet1030-portable-dvdplayer.html

in the hope that this will help even more keywords for search engine ranking as well.

From what I can see it will mean that all those web pages with the first product link which are still on the first page of google
search engines will throw up a error 404 as the page will not exist.

Is there a way to get around this??

Or .. do we just have to sit and bear it until google indexes our new html links?

[fergusw]

Look up 301 redirects in Google. They will do exactly wat you require i.e. inform Google that the page name has changed. Google's index will update as required and carry across any relevance the page already has!

[jont]

You can set redirects from an old page to another - covered on here and on the internet.

If you have 1st page ranked sites I don't see the need to change (changing may help but other areas may hold better improvements) ... OK to create new pages but if they are 1st page already adding additional content etc would be a stronger option IMHO.

[GAViN™©]

Look up 301 redirects in Google. They will do exactly wat you require i.e. inform Google that the page name has changed. Google's index will update as required and carry across any relevance the page already has!

Cheers Fergus. Will take a looki into this.

[GAViN™©]

I have had a bit read about on google, am I right that the only way to do this with a site in actinic is by the .htaccess file method?

creating a .htaccess file in notepad.
Enter this in the file:


Redirect 301 /old/old.html http://www.you.com/new.html


where /old/old.html -> is the path to the OLD file
http://www.you.com/new.html -> being the new url to the page.

so in my instance it would be:


Redirect 301 /acatalog/pet1030.html http://www.****.co.uk/philips-pet1030-portable-dvd-player.html



and then saving this to the root directory via ftp.

Have tried this and when i try to view the OLD webpage i still get an error 404 page cannot be displayed error.

[TraceyHand]

could that be because you've omitted the /acatalog from the new link, Gavin?

[GAViN™©]

could that be because you've omitted the /acatalog from the new link, Gavin?

sorry i just mistyped on this post lol. I actually do have


redirect 301 /acatalog/pet1030.html http://www.****.co.uk/acatalog/philips-pet1030-dvdplayer.html


and still get the error404 page :(

My hosting package is Windows, not linux, does this make a difference?

[TraceyHand]

did you create the .htaccess specifically for this purpose or did you already have one?

things to check, I guess, would be a) that you're hosting on a Linux server and b) that you saved the htaccess in the correct format.

If it'll let you..select 'all files' as the filetype and save directly as .htaccess
Alternatively, try saving as htaccess.txt and rename to .htaccess when uploaded to the server.

Don't forget it needs to be in your root folder (where ever that may be... at the same LEVEL as your acatalog folder, not IN it)

[GAViN™©]

did you create the .htaccess specifically for this purpose or did you already have one?


Was created purely for this purpose.

things to check, I guess, would be a) that you're hosting on a Linux server and b) that you saved the htaccess in the correct format.

Not on a linux server but Windows package.

If it'll let you..select 'all files' as the filetype and save directly as .htaccess
Alternatively, try saving as htaccess.txt and rename to .htaccess when uploaded to the server.

It is definetly the correct format, i checked in DOS.
File type is .HTACCESS

Don't forget it needs to be in your root folder (where ever that may be... at the same LEVEL as your acatalog folder, not IN it)

Yes, definetly in the root directory.

[TraceyHand]

things to check, I guess, would be a) that you're hosting on a Linux server and b) that you saved the htaccess in the correct format.

Not on a linux server but Windows package.


this could be the problem but I'll have to let someone else advise further.

alternatively, maybe your host (who is it?) doesn't allow you to use a .htaccess?

[Mike Hughes]

Tracey's right. Windows IIS doesn't understand htaccess files. You need to do the re-direct differently and I can't help you there.

Mike

[GAViN™©]

Tracey's right. Windows IIS doesn't understand htaccess files. You need to do the re-direct differently and I can't help you there.

Mike

I see the way to redirect 301 with Windows Hosting
can be using some php code, but this has to be put into the code of the page itself, which possibly will not work as it would need to be put into the Actinic template file which is of course for all the products and not just the product in question. :(

I have been considering requesting to move to a Linux server for other reasons, this can be added to the list.. The only thing that is stopping me is that we have just had a PCI compliance security test on our site which passed after getting some changes made with our web host.. And if we move to one of their linux packages am concerned that this might affect our PCI compliancy....

Might just have to leave this for the time being....

[fergusw]

alternatively in IIS you could set up individual virtual directory sites for each page routing to a fixed URL - i.e. the alternate address. Could be problematic if you have many, however this method is used to redirect non-www traffic to www traffic on a windows box.

[GAViN™©]

alternatively in IIS you could set up individual virtual directory sites for each page routing to a fixed URL - i.e. the alternate address. Could be problematic if you have many, however this method is used to redirect non-www traffic to www traffic on a windows box.

TBH it just seems too intense, as this re-directing would be required for all our products, as the idea would be to give more content to each html page of the product for keywords.

[fergusw]

T the idea would be to give more content to each html page of the product for keywords.

This would certainly bring more reward vs time that implementing many, many redirects to change the html page name.

You could try an experiment. get two equally ranking pages for term(s) and change one to [keyterm].html and leave one as [info#].html and see the impact. You could also try the 301 IIS style redirect on another, giving you a comparison.
It would still be a more effective use of your time maximising the content on the site rather than changing HTML page names, at least in the short term.

[grantglendinnin]

In an SEO point of view, you might want to be wary of Google showing tendencies of penalising sites which are on the redirect friendly side of the fence. Ie. have countless pages being redirected all over the place.

Actinic is relatively 'SEO' friendly' in terms of titles and meta tags. Shame the coding is all hard-coded and as far from being standards compliant as possible:(

Anyway, the best way to do this would be is ask your host if they support httpd.ini files, if so, a basic Google search will fire up the answer for you on how to create redirects in that file.

I'd always advise you to create an XML sitemap, A1 Sitemap Generator (http://www.micro-sys.dk/products/sitemap-generator/) does a fantastic job of that, and submit it to Google via Google's Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/).

If done properly, I'd suspect, depending on how frequent Google bots hit upon your site, that your ranking for the new redirected pages will pick up again in as little as a month if your site is crawled around every 7-10 days.

[GAViN™©]

In an SEO point of view, you might want to be wary of Google showing tendencies of penalising sites which are on the redirect friendly side of the fence. Ie. have countless pages being redirected all over the place.

Actinic is relatively 'SEO' friendly' in terms of titles and meta tags. Shame the coding is all hard-coded and as far from being standards compliant as possible:(

Anyway, the best way to do this would be is ask your host if they support httpd.ini files, if so, a basic Google search will fire up the answer for you on how to create redirects in that file.

I'd always advise you to create an XML sitemap, A1 Sitemap Generator (http://www.micro-sys.dk/products/sitemap-generator/) does a fantastic job of that, and submit it to Google via Google's Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/).

If done properly, I'd suspect, depending on how frequent Google bots hit upon your site, that your ranking for the new redirected pages will pick up again in as little as a month if your site is crawled around every 7-10 days.

Thanks for the input.
Already have a sitemap.xml file created using the free plug in over at Mole End software, its does a great job for creating the file from an actinic website. Also it creates the urllist.txt for submission to yahoo as well.

As our site is updated every day (!) with new products being added and old products being removed, i submit the sitemap at least the same time.

I will take a look at what your suggesting regarding httpd.ini files, but when you say support - in what way "support" ?

What I have decided is, when I upload new products from our stock controlled database, i will use new html links for the product page which has more detailed keywords as I originally stated on the first page of this threadf for the simple reason that these pages will not already be indexed by google.

I will as time goes on, amend current products with their new .html filenames, and do it gradually rather than do majority of them all in one go.

I don't see any easy alternatives really.