6 replies to this topic

[fluke]

Hello there

firstly i apologise if this post is in the wrong forum - this is my first post and i don't really know the way around here!

I would be grateful if it would be possible to get some opinions on a little problem I’ve got

I am relatively new to websites and SEO – although I have read extensively on the subject and understand the basic principles involved

My question is this:

I recently created a site (Sanibel-view.co.uk) for a neighbour of mine to advertise his property in Florida. Although this is not the first time I have created a website – it is the first time I have properly “gone live” with one. When creating the website I made a bit of a blunder – namely I named all the html pages with capital letters. (eg Florida-Holiday-Condo.html)

I didn’t think this much of a problem – I renamed my index page with a lower case I – and things seemed fine – until I started a link campaign and found that I had had 43 hits on my links page (presumably other sites checking out their reciprocal links) which had failed to connect - as they were using the “correct” file name – but with all lowercase characters.

I was thinking about renaming all my pages with lowercase letters but am concerned about the effect it may have on SE indexing etc although as my site is still young and I have a PR of 0. A few SE’s have indexed my home page – Google is the only engine to have indexed all my pages –also as I regularly update my pages Googlebot comes daily

Should I make the changes now while my site is still young? Or will I have trouble getting googlebot to start coming again daily if I rename these pages?
Should I just leave them and add a pointer page for those who get my links page name incorrect ? – or will leaving these with capital letters in cause me problems further down the line?

Thank you in advance of r any responses

[Jill]

Welcome Fluke!

Since the site is still relatively new, I'd change the file names to all lowercase. It will make things much easier for you, and it won't take long for the search engines to come and index your new pages anyway.

Good luck!

(Think I'll move this to the Search Engine Friendly Design forum.)

Jill

[fluke]

thank you very much for your prompt greeting and answer!

i shall make the appropriate changes

thanks again

[fluke]

i was thinking about leaving the old pages there, with just a link to it's new counterpart - this will help people find the pages but will it help SE's find and index them easier?

[Jill]

No, I'd get rid of the old ones...just bite the bullet. Or just change to a server where it's not case sensitive. That would also solve the problem!

[Randy]

Welcome Fluke !

I agree with Jill, it'll be better in the long run to go all lowercase now .

If you want to better control traffic going to the old pages and make sure humans and spiders alike find the new pages you can also add some redirects into the mix. I assume you're on a *nix server since filename capitalization is an issue.

Here's a quick and dirty tutorial on how to do it. This will all go into a file named .htaccess (notice the dot at the front) and uploaded to the root level of your server.

Let's say you had a few of old pages were named something like "Index.html", "Links.html" and "Page3.html". You've changed those to be named "index.html", "links.html" and "page3.html".

In your .htaccess file the following would redirect everything hitting the old files over to the new files:

redirect 301 /Index.html http://www.Sanibel-view.co.uk/index.html
redirect 301 /Links.html http://www.Sanibel-view.co.uk/links.html
redirect 301 /Page3.html http://www.Sanibel-view.co.uk/page3.html

There are other ways you can do it too if that doesn't work for some reason, but that's the easiest to implement.

[fluke]

Excellent - thanks alot guys!