Changing Subfolder that has been crawled before

[joony2008]

Question:

I am using a wordpress multisite and I enabled the crawl options yesterday

www.abc.com/subfolder <-original

but i find that www.abc.com/sub is good enough

I checked the site:abc.com but I find that my pages in the /subfolder has been crawled before.

Can I just change it to www.abc.com/sub or it will raise duplicate content issue?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Change it and make sure you update your sitemap so when it is crawled again, they will have it correctly.

if you don't already have a sitemap plug in use the google xlm sitemap plug in. Does a great job....

Cheers.....

[joony2008]

Thank you so much for answering this so quick

so i can just change it, and update the sitemap and i should have no problem right?

I was worried because I thought once google crawl my web, it remembers my previous /subfolder and add my /sub on top of it. and I thought my original /subfolder would be 404 and /sub would be duplicate content.

but I am so relieved now! I think i was just being paranoid.

[KeriMorgret]

You would want to use a 301 redirect (the Redirection plugin in WP is good for this) to tell Google that the old content moved to the new location. If you install it then do the changes, it may even do the necessary redirection for you automatically.

Am I correct in that you just set this up a day ago, so it's not like you're doing this three years in with a whole bunch of backlinks and needing to worry about link juice?

[joony2008]

Thank you so much Keri for answering my questions.

The subfolder website is totally new. Google hasn't crawled it fully yet.

there is no backlink. no one knows the website exists except our team.

hmmm. so updating the sitemap won't do it all? sigh. I am a newbie so i just have to trust you guys..

I already changed the subfolder and will download the Redirection plugin in WP right now

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/

[KeriMorgret]

You'll probably be just fine. The XML sitemap plugin will also help tell Google where the new URLs are, and you'll have the redirection as well.

[joony2008]

Thank you so much Keri again for your super fast reply.!

are you suggeting that I need to do both?

the redirection plugin and sitemap update?

or sitemap update should be just fine?

I am studying the Redirection plugin right now I think it would be useful to redirect what SEOMOZ analytic bot thinks is an wrong URL to a proper URL?

P.S. I am asking this because

I have an horrific experience before.  (it's a different case, not related to my previous questions) It's a bit different because I once moved one of my websites to a different domain and google just kept on crawling the previous domain name's data, and sending 404 and my new domain name got penalized. (I still can't get it shown on Google after a few months) so I thought it would happen the same to subfolders.

[KeriMorgret]

It's useful to have the redirection plugin in general, I've found.

Can you tell me a little bit about the crawl error you're getting from the SEOmoz crawl?

[joony2008]

Updated Reply

I will study the plugin and wait for MOZ crawl and will get back to you.

Thanks Keri

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The MOZ crawl shows yesterday's data. so it hasn't checked my updated URLs.

I am worried that all of my new /sub will be 404 by tomorrow.

[KeriMorgret]

If you go to the research tools tab, there's a link to SEO Web Crawler. You can request a crawl of your site instead of waiting the week for Roger to normally come back to your site.

[joony2008]

Thank you so much. I think it wasn't a big deal everything seems fine!