Renaming more SEO friendly URLs

[ZigE]

ugh: missed the 'to' in the title

I've had my (small) site for the past few years, but never really did anything in the way of SEO. But in the past few months have been doing alot of reading and optimizing, and I want to thank chris for removing all the seo-bull**** that seems to be rampant.

Anyway, I currently have /file.php, and changed it to /description-of-file.php

Changed all the links throughout my site, and setup a redirect in htaccess. However google still seems to be using ''file.php'' in the search results, with the updated page.

How do I fix this, :confused:

[alphomega]

Are you applying a 301 permant redirect header for the redirects in htaccess or are you using mod-rewrite?

[Chris]

Also remember there is no such thing as a perfect redirect. So you will probably take a traffic hit and could lose some PageRank.

I usually don't recommend URL changes for established sites.

[andyf]

If you have re-rewritten all url using 301 keep old domain name and files in old place for a few weeks to give the major search engines time to catch on to the changes
According to Google it will take 6-8 weeks to see the changes reflected on your pages.
Check again your .htaccess file whether you have implemented redirects properly.

[Vick!]

I think if your pages are not very well ranked or you are not getting links to internal pages its no problem in just replacing them with new names, redirect is even not neccessry. New pages will have PR after the next update.

And if you think your internal pages have some links from other sites or they are ranked, use 301 redirects and just make your site better in terms of SE friendliness.

[andyf]

If your internal pages are indexed and have some links then after having 301 redirect please notify to your link partners of so and ask them to make change.

MERRY XMAS !!!!:santasmil