April 28, 2006 Comments
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Dear Jill:
I look forward to reading your newsletter and value your expertise on SEO.
I am in the process of moving my site from one host to another. My current site has many pages worth PR4 and PR3. Would I lose that when I switch hosts?
When moved, I am renaming pages to url/keyword.html. I will have redirect to the new URLs. Would the new page url/keyword.html lose any ranking?
Thanks,
Andrew
Jill's Response
Hi Andrew,
As long as you're not changing domain names, then switching hosts should be of no consequence.
However, I definitely wouldn't change any existing URLs if I were you. There's really no benefit to having keywords in them, and there are lots of things that can go wrong in the redirection process, not to mention that it can take many months for the engines to "get" that they are now the same page.
If you can keep the old URLs, but just change any new URLs to your new format, that would be the best solution. There's such a misconception out there about using keywords in URLs that people go to great lengths to change them, only to be really, really sorry in the end as they do more harm than good, at least at first.
I personally never use keyword-rich URLs and never seem to have a problem with rankings.
Best,
Jill
Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.
CEO and founder of High Rankings®, Jill Whalen has been performing search engine optimization since 1995 and is the host of the free High Rankings Advisor search engine marketing newsletter, author of "The Nitty-gritty of Writing for the Search Engines" and founder/administrator of the popular High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum. In 2006, Jill co-founded SEMNE, a local search engine marketing networking organization for people and companies in New England.
High Rankings is an internationally recognized search engine optimization firm located in Framingham, MA specializing in search engine optimization, SEO consultations, in-house training, site audit reports, search marketing seminars and workshops. High Rankings has a 100% success rate for substantially improving client rankings and targeted traffic.
Jill speaks at national and international conferences and has been writing about SEO and search marketing since 2000. She's been quoted in such publications as The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report and The Washington Post. Her articles have appeared in numerous print magazines and online websites including CIO Magazine, CMS Focus, The Internet Marketing Report, ClickZ, WorkZ, Inc.com, Entrepreneur, Lycos Small Business, WebProNews, SiteProNews and others. Jill has also appeared on many online and offline radio programs such as Entrepreneur Magazine's E-Biz Radio Show, SearchEngineRadio and the eMarketing Talkshow.
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