Url hell

[outofboundsdigital]

This post is deleted!

[RyanKent]

When you move a site from an old URL format to a new one, you want to 301 redirect all the old URLs to the most appropriate page on the new site. You also want to follow up on a daily basis with Google and Bing WMT for any and all 404 errors. It sounds like you performed part of these steps but not all of them.

A few other suggestions:

• I checked your site's 404 page. I like that it retains your site's navigation. A big opportunity to improve is adding your site's Search box to the page.

• Add internal tracking for your site. Anytime someone lands on your 404 page, the link which led them to the page should be added to a log file. This file would allow you to locate and respond to 404 issues much faster then waiting for Google to crawl your site and find an issue.

• it sounds like your old URL structure was a mess. If there is any means to properly redirect groups of URLs with a single logical expression, that is preferable over manually redirecting each page one at a time. It may not be possible but I wanted to mention it.

You inquired about on page optimization suggestions. A few tips:

1. Your home page title is presently "Shop Now for Kitchen Supplies | Kitchen Gadgets | Kitchen Tools - Kitchenworks Inc". It's too broad and key word stuffed. I recommend focusing on a single key word such as "Kitchen Supplies - KitchenWorksInc.com". Three terms + "shop now" + your site identification is too much. If you insist on keeping all three terms I would recommend at least condensing it to "Kitchen Supplies, Gadgets and Tools | KitchenWorksInc.com"

2. You are currently not using a header tag. Use a H1 tag to reinforce your page's title.

3. Remove the meta keywords tag. This is a new site and that tag offers no value.

4. Your meta description does not impact your SEO ranking, but it does impact your click through rate. Your current description is mostly a list of key words. Try offering 1-2 sentences of something a bit more readable. "KitchenWorksInc offers every imaginable kitchen gadget and tool you can think of! If you can't find it here, it probably doesn't exist".

[outofboundsdigital]

Ryan; thanks so much for your help! i really really really appreciate it!

[ShaMenz]

Hi,

The major concern with you adding so many new URL's to the 301 list every day is the potential for processing bottlenecks which might adversely affect site performance.

If you have a database behind all this (and it is hard to imagine with this many products that you would not) AND if you can match an old-id to the new product then you could try:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(.)/(.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(.)/(.)$ /redirect.aspx?oldid=$1 [R=301,L]

Where redirect.aspx would

1. pull the new data from the database using the old-id
2. build a new page string to go to
3. finally do a 301 to the correct page.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[outofboundsdigital]

thanks sha!