April 28, 2006 Comments
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
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