Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I am struggling with renaming a lot of my web pages because I used short form acronyms vs long form keyword page names and now my pages aren't ranking where they should be and used to be.  I am weighing  a whole new web site or just a massive update with new page names.  I also have an old domain that 301's to the new url but the old one outranks the new one.  If you search google for cheap tubes the first domain you see is www.cheaptubesinc.com (the 301'd version) when the real url is www.cheaptubes.com.  I know I am getting a duplicate content penalty and when moz crawls my site they see 2X the page that I really have.  I tried fixing this with canonical tags but it only helped 5 pages according the moz crawls since doing them.  Since last July 4th my business has been declining and I know there was an SEO algorithm update last July 4th.   I think either method of renaming the web pages with better SEO for instance cheaptubes.com/single-wall-carbon-nanotubes.htm vs cheaptubes.com/swnts.htm  as it is currently.  In either case, it is still an HTML 2 website done on frontpage and the question I keep asking myself is if I should just scrap the whole site and start over with a more modern format.  Should I try to get a new site together with good SEO and publish it quickly vs rename and 301 a bunch of pages?  What about the old site? Do I need to track the old page names and 301 them to the new ones?  Any help is appreciates

Mike

Thank you Oleg - I did put the tag

into the head right below the robots & google bot code on every page.  I mistakenly deleted some very old non updated pages. Thx to moz, i have a list of the pages and will contact hosting co to 301 it. I think I ultimately have to 301 each page. I had moz recrawl my site last night but it said it dropped from 100 duplicate content penalties to 89, an improvement but not the one I hoped for.  I did have a client tell my the site was down today, contacted network solutions and they said it was up now but they had an outage last night.  Perhaps it affected the moz recrawl,but I can't know that.  I also want to change the names of the pages as an interim measure before I update the site to newer format. Should I create new optimized by name pages first and then get on the phone with tech support and 301 them all to the knew pages? seems logical but so did deleting old pages until moz couldn't find them, then i realized the bots will count it against me rather than the housekeeping that it was.

Mike

Mike

ok, got it, thank you so much Jane

Thx Jane

The problem is I can't simply 301 it because I'm not on apache.   I can do the canonical tag.  Of course I've already gone in and changed it over to the tag + refresh but server is down so it won't publish right now.  I was trying to get it done ahead of moz crawling my site today.  Is there a way to get moz to recrawl it after the changes are updated or do I need to wait another week?

Hi Jane, Oleg, & Bryan

I checked with the woman who designed my theme (she is awesome).  She offered the following suggestions which seem like the way to go for me. Are there any negatives that I'm not aware of with the options below?

Since you are still using FrontPage, just open your site, locate the appropriate pages, and type the following into the head area:

If you are on a Windows server, your web host can do the 301 redirect for you. You will tell them the name of the old pages and the name of the new pages and they will do the rest.

An easy alternate is for you to do the redirect yourself with an easy tag that goes into the head area of the old pages. This tag is called a redirect and redirects from the old page to the new one.

URL="http://www.newsite.com/newurl.html">

Google, Bing, and Yahoo all recognize the meta tag for the redirect and will adjust their indexing accordingly. I will usually leave an old page on the server for about 3 months to give the search engines time to catch up. Then I can delete the page.

You can, of course, get more "bang for your buck" by using both the canonical link and the meta refresh at the same time.

URL="http://www.newsite.com/newurl.html">

I like the last one, am going to try that unless you think its a flawed strategy.

Thanks for your help

Mike

Hi Jane

How do I change to canonical url's if I can't do a 301?

Mike

so how do I use the canonical tag since i can't 301 it?

Thanks Oleg

I can't 301 because I'm not using apache, still on frontpage.  I know its old, getting out my abacus now : )

does the 2 versions problem help to explain why my sales started dropping significantly after the google july 4th update? I know there were some SEO penalties in that update.  I also know a friendly competitor who saw a similar drop starting in early July.

Hi Jane

Thank you so much.  I am reviewing the link you provided.  I don't think I can 301 redirect because it is done in front page, not apache.  I have tried for years to find another platform but failed.  I spent years trying to figure out drupal, even ordered several books but no luck.  I tried concrete 5 and just using HTML 5 editor like coffee cup.  I keep struggling with getting them to work.  I've bought themes to use but can't get them operational.

I thought default.htm was supposed to be the home page, is that incorrect?

Mike

also on a page that moz ranks as an "F", I still rank high in organic results, see the results from when I searched for MWNTs below, I was 1st organic result.  If long form, multi walled carbon nanotubes I fell to 6th or 7th but still on  the first page.

https://www.google.com/search?q=mwnts&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&channel=sb#channel=sb&q=mwnts&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

Thank you Oleg, Bryan, & Jane.  I am a rookie when it comes to web development but my pages always ranked well because enough Moz tips sunk in.   See the alert from last weeks crawl below.

Pages with High Priority Issues

98Duplicate Page Content24XX (Client Error)If we look at the home page, it has 3 URLs, see belowURLPage AuthorityLinking Root DomainsExternal Link CountInternal Link CountStatus CodeDuplicate URLsDownload Duplicates

cheaptubes.com the source for carbon nanotubes home page

http://www.cheaptubes.com3322611882003 duplicates

cheaptubes.com the source for carbon nanotubes home page

http://www.cheaptubes.com/default.htm2422622001 of 3 duplicates

cheaptubes.com the source for carbon nanotubes home page

http://cheaptubes.com2931502002 of 3 duplicates

cheaptubes.com the source for carbon nanotubes home page

http://cheaptubes.com/default.htm2410462003 of 3 duplicates    Does this help?-Mike

when moz crawls my site they say I have 2x the pages that I really have & they say I am being penalized for duplicate content.  I know years ago I had my old domain resolve over to my new domain. Its the only thing that makes sense as to the duplicate content but would search engines really penalize me for that? It is technically only on 1 site.  My business took a significant sales hit starting early July 2013, I know google did and algorithm update that did have SEO aspects.  I need to resolve the problem so I can stay in business