Peter
06-14-2006, 04:15 AM
When dealing with search engines, a lot of information is still unknown as to what happens when you move sites or pages on your site that already have an established page rank in place. Hopefully some of these answers will help :)
I've changed my site from .php to .asp. How to do the switch without loosing any existing search engine rankings?
You can do this two ways:
Make Apache parse all .php files as .asp files. By doing this, you do not have to change any files or file extensions nor do you need to worry about any redirects. To accomplish this, place this code in your httpd.conf:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .asp
Use a 301 redirect from the .php files to the .asp files. You can do that by placing this code in the root directory of your website:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*)\.php$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1.asp
I just changed the name of my domain. How can I switch without losing my rankings with the existing domain/site?
You will need to write a 301 redirect from the old domain name to the new domain name. You will need to add the following lines of code to a file called .htaccess and place it in the root directory of the old domain:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old-domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Why is it that all my pages are not being indexed?
If your site is < 6 months, your domain/web site is too new to be worrying about getting all pages indexed. For this, you must be patient. It takes time to crawl through your whole website and add your pages to the search indexes. If you are sure your pages are search engine friendly then you have nothing to worry about.
If your site is > 6 months, you need to investigate your website to make sure all of your pages can be found and indexed. Have you:
Made a real sitemap?
Made a Google or Yahoo sitemap?
Used search engine friendly URLs?
Used search engine friendly navigation?
Which is better? hyphen (-), underscore(_), or plus sign(+) in domain names?
Hyphens are the best keyword delimiter you can use in your domain name. Hyphens are universally accepted as a keyword separator by all major search engines. MSN and Yahoo recognize the underscore (_) as a keyword separator but Google does not.
Which is better? - text links or graphical links?
Text links are better for Search Engines. Text links can contain the anchor text that your page wishes to rank well for and that is an important factor in all three search engines, especially Google. Image links are still valuable but do have less benefits compared to text links. This is true despite image tags having the ALT attribute available. The ALT attribute can contain keywords but thanks to keyword stuffing they now are virtually worthless. (You should be using your ALT attributes for usability and accessibility and not SEO anyway).
To be updated. :)
I've changed my site from .php to .asp. How to do the switch without loosing any existing search engine rankings?
You can do this two ways:
Make Apache parse all .php files as .asp files. By doing this, you do not have to change any files or file extensions nor do you need to worry about any redirects. To accomplish this, place this code in your httpd.conf:
AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .asp
Use a 301 redirect from the .php files to the .asp files. You can do that by placing this code in the root directory of your website:
RedirectMatch 301 ^/(.*)\.php$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1.asp
I just changed the name of my domain. How can I switch without losing my rankings with the existing domain/site?
You will need to write a 301 redirect from the old domain name to the new domain name. You will need to add the following lines of code to a file called .htaccess and place it in the root directory of the old domain:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?old-domain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
Why is it that all my pages are not being indexed?
If your site is < 6 months, your domain/web site is too new to be worrying about getting all pages indexed. For this, you must be patient. It takes time to crawl through your whole website and add your pages to the search indexes. If you are sure your pages are search engine friendly then you have nothing to worry about.
If your site is > 6 months, you need to investigate your website to make sure all of your pages can be found and indexed. Have you:
Made a real sitemap?
Made a Google or Yahoo sitemap?
Used search engine friendly URLs?
Used search engine friendly navigation?
Which is better? hyphen (-), underscore(_), or plus sign(+) in domain names?
Hyphens are the best keyword delimiter you can use in your domain name. Hyphens are universally accepted as a keyword separator by all major search engines. MSN and Yahoo recognize the underscore (_) as a keyword separator but Google does not.
Which is better? - text links or graphical links?
Text links are better for Search Engines. Text links can contain the anchor text that your page wishes to rank well for and that is an important factor in all three search engines, especially Google. Image links are still valuable but do have less benefits compared to text links. This is true despite image tags having the ALT attribute available. The ALT attribute can contain keywords but thanks to keyword stuffing they now are virtually worthless. (You should be using your ALT attributes for usability and accessibility and not SEO anyway).
To be updated. :)