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SEO best practice

Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 2:20 pm
by alex.barylski
Just noticed we do not have a SEO forum here...? So I posted in here as I am having troubles signing up an other SEO forums.

I took over an old site which was in need of an update...dropped the files and replaced them with SEF static URI's

Google unfortunately has many of those files cached and now they do not exist I am certain it's affecting our SEO. Should I redirect all permenently to homepage or have .htaccess return a 404 -- if that is possible or even the default as the files no longer exist.

I assume it takes SE's a while to clear their cache and start paying attention to the new files?

Re: SEO best practice

Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 4:44 pm
by Weirdan

Re: SEO best practice

Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 7:26 pm
by mikemike
If you still can, just put some rules in .htaccess for your old pages with permenantly moved http codes (301) to the new pages. This shouldn't affect your SEO too much. The link posted above will help, but only for Google, there are plenty of other SE's about being used, you shouldn't just be Google-friendly.

It's important that you use the 301 redirect, rather than something like header("Location: ...");

Re: SEO best practice

Posted: Tue Jun 09, 2009 8:57 am
by alex.barylski
The thing is, the old pages made no sense, had zero structure and were best just being removed completely, so there is no re-mapping, just startingt from scratch.

Secondly the server is IIS and PHP so no .htaccess files...anyway around this using IIS config files or anything? :P

Re: SEO best practice

Posted: Tue Jun 09, 2009 9:06 am
by onion2k
You should brush up on your HTTP codes. There's one for specifically for this: 410 Gone.

Re: SEO best practice

Posted: Tue Jun 09, 2009 10:16 am
by alex.barylski
Wasn't aware of 410 -- oddly I just read the document the other day while implementing a request object. :P

Anwyays, sounds like Google suggests, the best overall way is to use robots.txt and block the files which you delete.

Using header codes is out of the question, as the files are gone and they were all HTML and it's an IIS server with no mod-rewrite or ISAPI rewrite plugin either.

Alternatively, I could re-create the HTML files and leave a meta="nofollow" or similar tag...but again the files are gone and the directory is a lot cleaner now so I liked the sound of using robots.txt and letting time takes it course I guess.

Re: SEO best practice

Posted: Tue Jun 09, 2009 10:29 am
by onion2k
PCSpectra wrote:Using header codes is out of the question, as the files are gone and they were all HTML and it's an IIS server with no mod-rewrite or ISAPI rewrite plugin either.
Can't you install one? http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/460/usin ... te-module/

Re: SEO best practice

Posted: Tue Jun 09, 2009 10:49 am
by alex.barylski
No it's a shared server completely outside my control and the sysadmins know less than I do so I can't even be bothered. :P