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Rewriting your websites URLs is an important and proven method for successful SEO. There are four core reasons for this, they maybe staring you in the face but to some they maybe not so obvious, please read on to see how a re write can benefit your site.

1. Duplicate content
2. Google reads keywords in the URL
3. Combine strength of multiple sites
4. Links go to 2 different places

Duplicate Content – Having 2 URLs that point to a single page can be seen as duplicate content even if they are situated on the same domain. The most common error is when you have the URL www.seoconsult.co.uk/index.html and the standard www.seoconsult.co.uk both displaying exactly the same site.

Keywords in the URL – Having your keywords in your URL, even if they are a sub domain is extremely advantageous from a search results perspective. This is the first place a crawler will look and the likelihood is you will gain results faster this way than any other form of search engine optimisation,

Combine strength – If you have used more than one site on more than one domain, or you have a .com and a .co.uk site that are exactly the same, the best thing you can do is to combine the strength of all the sites. Through a 301 redirect Google will see that the sites have all been permanently moved to go to one site, merging all the PageRank and authority that the others have gathered, thus creating one powerful domain.

External linking – When outside sources are organically linking to your site, there is a chance that some could link to www.seoconsult.co.uk/index.html, this leakage could be detrimental to your long-term authority and PageRank.

The best way to solve all of the above issues is via a htaccess file if you’re on an apache/linux server, or through the control panel on a Microsoft server. Both these methods can put permanent forwards from one page to another and here at SEO Consult we ensure that every client takes full benefit for this service.

I had a client say to me the other day “Moving his website was as hard as moving House”, so I though I would address the problems involved in order to make this less stressful. I would say at least half of the people who have moved their website to another domain at some point, the main reason being the targeting suffix i.e. .co.uk .fr, was geographically incorrect for their target audience, although this has been partly solved by the geo-targeting feature in webmaster tools. The other reason was to have their keywords in the first phase of the URL, for instance if your primary keyword was “boat”, you would want a url which appeared like this www.boat.co.uk, as Google puts high value on the url matching your keyword. This can also be solved via sub domains, a topic for a different day. Anyway back to the topic in hand. By moving your site your goal is to make the transition without effect to your users and SEO, so here are the steps I would recommend.

1) Always keep you old url and forward it to your new site, so you don’t lose any of your customers and the Page-Rank you have developed for the site always use a 301 permanent redirect. A common mistake by junior developers is to use a 302 tempory redirect, this is a sackable offence if you ask me and does a lot of damage.

2) 301 redirects all the pages of your site to the relevant pages within your new site as this will minimise any loss on direct traffic, don’t just redirect it to your homepage. If this is not possible make it the nearest relevant page.

3) If your new website is a redesign of your old site, I would recommend moving the old site over to the new Url whilst waiting for it to be cached, then erect the new site. This might temporarily effect your ranking but it identifies to Google you’re just moving your domain, not using someone else’s domain to increase your PR.