Using 301 Redirects - Will I lose ranking?

jumpenjuhosaphat · 03-30-2007, 09:07 AM

Well, this is sort of a double question. I want to use rewrite to change underscores in my URL's to hyphens......Also, I would like to eventually move the entire site to a new domain name....If I use 301 redirects, will my new pages get the search engine ranking and PR from the old pages, or will I need to start over? Same question for changing the underscores to hyphens, will I lose all of the ranking and PR from those pages?

oseymour · 03-30-2007, 09:20 AM

you will not lose rankings

but you should not redirect because you want to change underscores to hyphens, there is no extra SEO benefit here.

Do not change domain names unless it it absolutely neccessary. You got a shorter more concise name, you got an older domain with more trust ect. again not because of hyphens or underscore.

Aviva · 03-30-2007, 10:29 AM

301 redirects are a bit of a gamble, but most of the time they work and you will retain your rankings. I've never tested 301'ing a page twice in a row - not sure what effect that will have.

Underscores to hyphens makes sense to me. If you dig around the archives, I think John has tested that one before.

jumpenjuhosaphat · 03-30-2007, 09:31 PM

Thanks for the tips. Matt Cutts has said that there are great benefits to using a hyphen in place of the underscore. It turns out that the underscore concatenates 2 words, and the search engines see those 2 words as a single word. You won't rank for those keywords unless someone deliberately types "keyword1_keyword2" into the search bar. Hyphens on the other hand are viewed as a word separator.

The reason that I am considering moving the site is because currently it's on a sub-domain, and I want to move it to its own domain.

Thanks for the help.

netjobs · 03-30-2007, 10:22 PM

You'll intially loose few rankings, because of your backlinks points to your sub-domain, better leave it as it is and try to create pages with (-) in future...

Dotster · 03-31-2007, 12:14 AM

I guess you don't lose rankings. I had such problem. Now everthing ok.

Bagi Zoltán · 03-31-2007, 02:48 AM

I did a fast experiment. I searched for aliinurl:artcle directories and I didn't see any urls with underscore, but tons of hypens. I will also consider rewriting the urls with hypens, because the temporary ranking drop will worth the future traffic in in my opinion.

Ar3d · 03-31-2007, 04:21 AM

no you will not.. it will consider as your one by using redirection..