3 replies to this topic

[Karine]

Hi all!

This is my first post on this site.

I am currently in the process of re-desinging my web site. There is an exisiting folder structure in the site, but it is not very practical and I would prefer to have the same folder structure for all languages.

My question is:
If my linking is done right, and my index.shtml page remains in the same place, will SE spider the new pages and folders?
Should I keep file names if they are to be in folders with different names from the original site?

I want to ensure minimum impact on my SE rankings and visitors.

Thank you for your help :-)

Karine Simard
Infodev
www.infodev.ca

[SearchRank]

Welcome to the forum Karine

So long as your home page links to all your other pages or at least the main sections of your site, the SEs should have no problem crawling the new content. It will probably take a month or so for SEs to find your new content and then another couple months before the content can be effective in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

If you change file names of specific pages or their location, you will most likely experience a drop in rankings and traffic but so long as your site is crawlable, the SEs should pick up new content and eventually your rankings should improve once again.

All in all when you redesign or restructure a site, there will be a short time that you will experience a drop in traffic but once the SEs have had a chance to crawl your new content and analyze it, you should then have a chance to be competitive once again in the SERPs.

This of course is all dependent on how well you optimize your new content as well.

Good luck with your redesign!

[Tenyque]

If my linking is done right, and my index.shtml page remains in the same place, will SE spider the new pages and folders?

As searchrank pointed out, the spiders should reindex the new site barring any problems with the site setup (which you probably don't have since you have files in there now!).

As said it may take a while, especially if you have a large site. You may want to consider setting up a custom 404 page that in turn returns an appropriate 301 redirect to the new file should one of the older file names gets requested to speed up the process. This would probabley be overkill for a smaller site with decent link popularity/PR though.

Should I keep file names if they are to be in folders with different names from the original site?

This would not be necessary - if the file is in a new directory or parent directory you should feel free to change the filename also. A different URL is a different URL methinks.

[Karine]

Thank you very much :-) Now I feel confortable going with my new folder organization.