Domain name mapping – could really use some help before updating "name servers"
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A couple of day have now passed and thing are generally looking better.
I ended up & verifying both http://www.sci-scotland.org.uk/ and http://www.sci-scotland.org.uk as google seemed to consider them as separate entities. The guidance notes suggest when you have such a situation you should add both to the webmaster account and verify have ownership which I’ve done. I now get stats for both and can see that the new website is being crawled.
I also noticed and option to instruct google how to react when it finds a link to your website & how it should displays your urls in search result. So I’ve advised it to handle any link or match starting http://www.sci-scotland.org.uk/ by dropping the www. part.
It says it’ll take some time before search results show a uniform url so right now I’m seeing results for the new WordPress pages correctly displayed sans the www. but matches relating to pages on our old website do still include www.
One issue I do have is that our new webpages (we are primarily using static pages) are near enough invisible when I run what I think are related searches and I guess this is in part because they are new. However, in the same search result I will quite often find a match for one of the old website pages at or very near the top (the site looked dated but ranked well it seems).
The downside is that the link is to a page that no longer exists so I get taken to a page on our new WP site displaying a message “oops that page can’t be found”, which isn’t ideal really.
Now looking at the google stats these old pages tended to rank highly in related searches and are quite often linked to by a number of other external sites. In a bid to take advantage of this ‘popularity’ and minimise visitors getting that message if there any reason why I couldn’t re-name the equivalent page on our new WP site to match the old page e.g. if on the old site we had a page called ‘sci-scotland.org.uk/example.shtml/’ and a page on the new site called ‘sci-scotland.org.uk/example/’ could I just add the .shtml?
I tested it out on one of our pages and the previously non-working link worked fine and took me to the page I wanted so it is do-able. However, is it advisable e.g. does it create issues down the line, would it look suspect to search engines, am I breaking some protocol by adding .shtml to a WP page which presumably doesn’t use .shtml?
Hope this makes sense and sorry for my version of War & Peace!!!
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Hi!
WordPress.com will automatically correct the page slug if you try to put .html. For example, if you try to put sci.scotland.org.uk/about.html, it would switch it to sci.scotland.org.uk/about-html. There isn’t a way around this currently. Regarding the Google search results, it will just take some time for the old results to expire from the search results and the new results to be crawled. You could ask Google to remove the old site URLs here:
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Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for looking over things and sticking with me.
I do see what you are saying about WP converting .html to -html when I rename a page slug. Even with that slight discrepancy in the slug google surprisingly did still find the right page when I was playing around last night. However, if I pasted the url with ‘.html’ rather than ‘-html’ directly into my browser’s url bar WP didn’t like it and took me to the ‘oops, page can’t be found’ screen. So going through google .html & -html seem interchangeable but WP is a stickler for detail!
Which I think scuppers any plans I had to try and ‘recycle’ the original page names……
As of now our new (static) pages are on the whole quite anonymous when it comes to search engine matches (despite the words I’m searching on being in the page text or page titles) whereas their old equivalents seem to rank very highly. Of course the pages can’t be found on our new site but if nothing else people do still land there which is something I guess.
My dilemma is do I request google remove the old urls now and risk us disappearing into virtual obscurity or do I hold fire and hope that the new pages slowly creep up the rankings and once they’re a bit more mature then delete the old urls (assuming google doesn’t decide to delete them as part of any housework it does).
I have spent quite a lot of time the last few days reading various articles and stressing about SEO but if I’m honest I’m probably more confused than when I started! (just an overwhelming amount of info, terminology and things that probably don’t apply to WP.com).
Sorry to put you on the spot….but if you were in the same boat, but knowing what you do, would you take the plunge now and cull the old urls or wait and see how the chips fall?
Also is there any point in me submitting an index to google or should I leave google to do its own thing (think it’s linked to in our robots.txt anyhow which google is aware of)?
Thanks again Jeremy – I really can’t thank you enough for all the support :)
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I would probably just let the search engines do their normal update process – on the good side – the visitor is on your web site
This might help – some is a bit thick
Search Engines and Building Traffic
http://en.support.wordpress.com/getting-more-views-and-traffic/
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/seo-on-wordpress-com/
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2013/04/11/seo-and-your-blog/The folks at WordPress.com have written an e-book about it! http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/grow-traffic-ebook/
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Hi @esfife – Like @auxclass, I would likely just let the search engines do their normal update process. In my opinion, spending extra time worrying about which URLs are indexed by Google takes away from time you could spend posting to your blog and building your community outside search engine traffic. I certainly understand the important of SEO, and I don’t want you to lose out on what you’ve already built up. However, that’s the plan I would take going forward.
The links that @auxclass mention are also terrific (thanks for posting those!). I would definitely give them a read!
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@ auxclass. I’ve taken a look through the guides you linked to (really helpful) and it’s defintely given me some ideas to pass onto the team.
@jeremylduvall. Thanks for giving me your honest opinion on things. I’d pretty much come to the same conclusion as looking at the SEO optimisation info on Google most is out of our control, so we just need to go with the flow and see how things go.
The feeling I have is that is we post varied & interesting content regularly with relevant tags people will find us one way or another.
Having done a number of searches I am bit less worried about us disappearing from view. There are numerous other sites that mention us and link to our homepage, so if they don’t get a direct match on a query then I’m sure visitors will still find us.
So far monitoring the stats on WP & Google I actually think we’re seeing something of an upturn in terms of traffic, so perhaps the new content is helping our visibility. Time will tell.
I also set up some tags to our blog entries and as a result associated posts are appearing on google when I do searches, so I think the key is that we bring people in via the blog rather than worrying too much about them landing on static pages. Once in the door they’ll find the info they want easy enough :)
I’m also about to link our organisational facebook page to the blog (140 friends) so that should help us publicise things to a fairly ‘like minded’ audience and in turn our posts may filter through to their pages/walls to be seen by a wider audience.
The more I look at this stuff the more I think we’ll be fine.
On that note I’ll close this thread down (no more questions for a while I promise!).
All that’s left to say if what a wonderfully welcoming and helpful community this is and a
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thanks to you both for sticking with me and for all the assistance you’ve given – I really can’t thank you enough!
Warmest wishes & take care,
Mark -
You be welcome & good luck
yes new content seems to help the site overall based on my not very scientific observations, when I make a new Post, other traffic seems to be up also
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