SEO Tycoon

**mastermemei** · 08-02-2007, 07:50 AM

Hi everyone, I am planning to rewrite my dynamic URLs to static.
Can anyone share their own experiences on the immediate effects of doing this on their indexed pages, rankings, PR and the site itself.

I'm about anxious about losing those indexed pages and having a case of duplicate content.

Any idea will be greatly appreciated. thanks in advance!

**chrishirst** · 08-02-2007, 08:53 AM

Quote:

Hi everyone, I am planning to rewrite my dynamic URLs to static.
Can anyone share their own experiences on the immediate effects of doing this on their indexed pages, rankings, PR and the site itself.

Good plan, change all the URLs, destroy your pages ranking in SEs for 3 to 6 months.

**mastermemei** · 08-02-2007, 09:04 AM

oh ok, any other ideas?
anyone else willing share their experiences to a confused newbie?

**ADAM Web Design** · 08-02-2007, 09:37 AM

I've done it a couple of times before, and it has worked. The key is to 301 the old pages to their corresponding new ones and to change as little as possible...at least this is what I've found.

Mind you, I have only done this 3 times and not in the last 3-4 years.

Hirst: I don't think this person would lose any rankings. The only reason most people have to change dynamic URLs to static is because the rankings aren't good enough anyway.

**mastermemei** · 08-02-2007, 09:48 AM

thanks for those input adam, actually I'm changing the URL for my product pages which are mostly supplementary pages in the hope of gaining rankings for it. Currenly, I only rank using 3 or 5 of my pages.

**webmastery** · 08-02-2007, 09:57 AM

I wouldn't bother. Rewrites won't get you out of the supplementals, and putting keywords in the URL is not that big of a boost.

I once thought like you did and wasted time doing the same thing. It wasn't worth it, IMHO.

**chrishirst** · 08-02-2007, 10:07 AM

Too many people rattle on about "friendly URLs as if they are some "magic bullet"

Even with 301 redirects in place you WILL loose all your ranking for the time it take for the 301s to take hold with search engines. It is NOT an instantaneous thing at all. 3 months is about the average minimum time it takes to settle down.

I should recheck your site today, you won't find any supplemental pages, so your reason for going down this route has disappeared.

**mastermemei** · 10:27 AM

thanks for showing me the other side of things. It worked on my then 6 entries blog so I was thinking it can be effective for the product pages in my site.

that's why I went to this forum to learn from other people. In this case I don't want to learn from my own mistake

any other ideas? thanks!

**chrishirst** · 08-02-2007, 12:00 PM

You are mixing up cause and effect

It appeared to "work" on your blog because most blogs use the same words as the title and navigation anchor text as they do for the page name. And it is that that makes the difference NOT the URL/page name.

the page could be called /xxw234h789.htm and you would see the same effect.

**ForrestCroce** · 08-03-2007, 12:46 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Too many people rattle on about "friendly URLs as if they are some "magic bullet"

Yeah, it's true. Keywords in the URL have some effect, but not that much, and good content with organic links - the ones other people make without talking to you about it - overcome bad URLs. Still, when you're building new stuff and have the opportunity to plan things out, picking good URLs is part of a complete breakfast.

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Even with 301 redirects in place you WILL loose all your ranking for the time it take for the 301s to take hold with search engines. It is NOT an instantaneous thing at all. 3 months is about the average minimum time it takes to settle down.

The last time I changed a page, I saw the results pretty quickly. Within a week, but this was just one page.

**chrishirst** · 08-03-2007, 10:20 AM

Changing one or a few pages (few as a numeric value will be relative to the overall size of the site) is rarely going to be a problem because the other pages in the site are going remain as they were and will point to the new url(s) for the page(s).
So the SE crawlers still have the majority of the entry points they use normally and thus be able to pick up the new URIs quite quickly. The 301 status on the changed pages also reinforces the changes.

When you change the entire site structure the entry points are gone and the crawlers are starting from scratch.
Think back to how long it took for everything to be crawled & indexed when your site was brand new, because this is the scenario you have just presented the SEs with.

The 301 redirects will eventually pass the external link value onto the new pages but it takes time.
You need to remember that the vast majority of links to your pages come from your own pages and you just removed them all.