Help with Renaming URL's

[gymmad]

This post is deleted!

[Marcus_Miller]

This all depends how the developer is renaming the pages. Ideally, they should be putting a 301 redirect in place to point the old page to the new page. This passes most of the value to the new page so should stop any major problems. That said, if you can visit your backlinks and get them updated to the new page then that would also be a worthwhile process.

Alternatively, if these pages rank well and the URLs are not terrible (the new ones are better but...) then do you have to move them?

This is something that needs to be handled properly so I would quiz your developer, ensure he is applying some SEO smarts here and determine if you can easily update your backlinks to the these individual pages.

If you are going to go ahead the following should be done in order of priority

1. 301 old pages to new

2. update the backlinks where possible

I have had a quick look at the backlink profile for that one page and you have a fair few keyword links but from some fairly dubious sources so I would not bust a gasket updating all those blog comment links from foreign language blogs!

Hope that helps!

Marcus

[gymmad]

Hiya Marcus,

Thanks for your answer. So in your opinion renaming the urls will be fine as long as I put the 301 redirects in place? I just hope I do not lose Page Rank......really worrying me but I guess if I do it will hopefully only be a short term thing. Thanks again.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Jason,

Page Rank does not get you customers buddy and it is also horribly out of date if you are worrying about toolbar page rank. You are not even moving the page to another domain so this really should be a light weight move that will be well handled by a 301 redirect.

It may be worth doing an inventory of your links to the pages in open site explorer and updating any that you see as valuable and any others you can easily change but you should not have a major problem with this kind of change.

All the best

Marcus