Will renaming webpage files mess up my page rank?

[mikapc]

I have managed a tiny niche business website for my father since 1998; for a number of specific terms it ranks within the first page sometimes third from the top. I am working on cleaning the web pages up and one thing I want to do is to have more descriptive html names; for example instead of prodnfo.html I want to rename it to widgets_product_info.html . Now will doing this mess up my page rank if I eliminate the old prodnfo.html and replace it?

[regmac]

A little trick on the .htaccess file located on your root directory can do it all.. Mod rewrite is the code..

Learn it here http ://corz. org/serv/tricks/ htaccess2 .php

Will it hurt rankings? I don't think so, as long as you do it right. Also, there's another thing you need to know, the rel canonical..

Learn it here http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...canonical.html

[Cricket]

Changing page file names makes them brand new pages.

[LailaScott]

Originally Posted by Cricket

Changing page file names makes them brand new pages.

Yes and it will affect the URLs. Which may affect also the inbound links that were link on the previous URLs. It would appear as a broken link because the URL does not exit anymore.

[joelchrist]

Yes. It will affects your site rank. You have to again work hard to get your ranking.

[thegetpr]

yes, by changing your webpage, it will affect your page rank

[sabqat]

No, if you are making it better than before.

[1websitedesign]

yes i think so it can have effect on your page rank.

[Manikkavalli]

changing your page name would absolutely affect your page rank

[gobeyond]

As long as you do 301 redirects the right way, your pagerank should NOT be affected. With 301 redirects, you are telling search engines that these old pages have been changed to the new ones. Search engines will understand that and transfer your pagerank to the new pages.

[Natural Elements]

Originally Posted by gobeyond

As long as you do 301 redirects the right way, your pagerank should NOT be affected. With 301 redirects, you are telling search engines that these old pages have been changed to the new ones. Search engines will understand that and transfer your pagerank to the new pages.

That's correct, with proper 301 redirects in .htaccess, you should get back your PR (be patient). Now if you use a 301 that is not relevant, I am not sure you will keep it.

Remember that the PR transfert will take time.

[chillfire]

Definately use some form of permanent redirect (301), however if you are running static pages ie .html/.htm you may run into problems as they dont understand code like vb/php etc,(I am not sure if you can 301 with Javascript - worth investigating) so you will need to setup something like an .htaccess system to manage these redirects for you. If you have loads of pages to redirect you will need to get some mates around and some beers and test every one of them...

If you are using a data driven type site asp/php/asp.net etc there are loads of ways to 301 correctly in code//htaccess files/web.config files etc Just pick one method you are comfortable doing and go for it.

To see what you are dealing with do a site: google;

site:[domain name]

This will tell you how many pages google knows about, I think the same works with yahoo, not sure about bing, throw all of this into a spreadsheet so at least you have a list of whats out there on each SE.


NOTE: if moving an entire site
Something to remember is to make sure you 'tell' google, in google webmaster tools, there is an option to 'move a site' this will only work if you are moving one domain to another, but just makes sure google stops indexing the old one and starts on the new one straight away - YOU MUST 301 the site/pages as well!

goodluck

ps: I am doing the same thing for a client but they have 67000 pages, all fun and games!