Hi,
I'm very much a novice webmaster and I used yahoo sitebuilder to create my website. recently I decided to change all of my page urls to more search engine friendly terms. I didn't want to lose potential visitors to my site in the interim so I created redirects from my old urls (many of which currently show up in google searches) to my new urls. I tried to do a 301 redirect but I couldn't get it to work with sitebuilder and I tried a couple of other methods unsuccessfully as well. The one that I was able to get to work is the following:
then I erased all of the old pages from my sitemap, erased all of the content on the pages (not sure if that was smart) and added the following to try to prevent the old urls from being crawled:
<meta name="robots"'content="noindex".
my fear is that search engines, google especially, will think that I'm trying to do some sort of shady cloaking activity to double my traffic and will penalize my site. Should I be worried? And is there a better method, using yahoo sitebuilder, for redirecting my pages? Whatever method I used, I anticipate using it for several months- until all my images are indexed because I rely heavily on google image searches.
Is there no penalty at all for a 301?
and do you think there might be a penalty for my refresh method?
A problem with sitebuilder:
If I recall correctly, the 301 redirect code needs to be the very first line of code (or maybe this was one of the other methods I tried unsuccessfully.) Anyway Sitebuilder lets you insert html but I don't think it lets you insert it on the very first line of code. maybe I just need to keep trying as different sites seem to phrase it slightly differently. Or maybe there's another way I can edit in html since sitebuilder seems to have limited control there.
Also yahoo wouldn't let me create .htaccess file because it said files can't start with a "."
I'm going to reveal my ignorance here- I don't know the answer.
My computer's operating system is windows but I'm guessing you're asking about the host server. My site is hosted by yahoo and I just looked at yahoo webhosting and all I could find was some talk about an "SSL secure server." that's probably not what you're looking for.
thanks for helping me with this, by the way.
knowing what your server is is vital in order to set up a redirect. The code varies depending on the host server.
I am not sure which Server yahoo uses so I can't help you more than that. If anyone happens to know, then you can apply the proper redirect code.
If I have more time this afternoon, I'll do a search about this.
awaiting an answer from yahoo about their server type. they're supposed to email back within 24 hrs. I also asked them how to phrase the code for a 301 redirect.
I'm happy to have the redirected pages removed from SERP as long as the new pages replace them in searches. I guess ideally the new pages would become indexed before the old pages drop out. What I'm worried about though is that search engines will think I'm engaging in some sort of trickery and penalize my entire site. From what I've read, juliensimon is correct that 301's are the safest way to do this.
yahoo tells me they have a LINUX server.
as for a redirect method, they recommended the page refresh code that I'm already using. I asked if there's a 301 redirect code that works with sitebuilder and I'm waiting to hear a response.
I found quick and better to block old page urls in Robot.txt, request immediatly pages removal on the webmaster tools. Then just remove old pages on the server.
I use to use 301, but search engines will not pick up the new pages for a while and old urls will stay on search engine.
I know that Google recommend to leave the old url with a notification "Page has moved, bah blah blah" but visitors are smater, they just return to the domain name and find what they are looking for.
Google should index quicker the new pages, so there won't be downtime.
As you may know, when you've got an e-commerce, products change often, manufacturers change their line of products, etc... We constantly update our site with new dynamic pages, and cannot leave hundred dead old pages.
As you may know, when you've got an e-commerce, products change often, manufacturers change their line of products, etc... We constantly update our site with new dynamic pages, and cannot leave hundred dead old pages.
my situation is different. I'm an architect so my site has relatively few pages and I'll only be adding a few new pages a year. I'll almost never be removing old pages at least not until I think that I'm showing too many projects in which case I'd do some editing. What I'm doing right now is renaming pages (to be more search engine friendly) but leaving the content the same.
I've found that probably 90% of my site visitors are coming from google image searches. It took a long time for my images to get indexed (~6 months) and if I simply remove my old url's I'm going to lose 90% of my site traffic until the renamed pages/images get indexed.
"Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Small Business Support. I understand
you would like to use a 301 redirect with a Sitebuilder site. I
apologize for any inconvenience but this feature is not available at
this time."
I guess this means that no matter what 301 code, I insert it's not going to work for my site. Something tells me that if I were a little more web savvy, I could figure out a way. oh well... I guess I'll have to rely on having two sets of url's with refresh page redirects on the old pages- and hope that I don't get penalized for trickery.
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