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We're planning on rolling out a redesign of an existing page, and at the same time, we're looking to possibly changing the URL of the page. Currently, the URL is

www.blah.com/phraseword1-phraseword2-phraseword3-phraseword4

and we're ranking top 3 in Google SERP for that 4-word phrase. The keyword phrase is something we have in our Page Title, Site Copy and the URL.

Now, we are planning on simplifying the URL to below..

www.blah.com/phraseword1-phraseword2

The plan is to 301 redirect the original URL to this new URL and actually work the exact phrase into the copy a few more times. My understanding is that URL doesn't get as much weight as it does in the past, but it's still important.

So my question is...

How important is the URL in this case where we will continue to have it in our page title and also we'll be working more copy on to the page with the appropriate keyword?

Will 301 redirect from the old URL address the issue of passing SEO value for that keyword phrase?

Thanks,
Joe

If you search the term "windows-8-start-menu" in Google, the page here ranks 8th on average currently...

www.pokki.com/windows-8-start-menu

However, if you do the same search in Y! and Bing, the page is nowhere to be found and as mentioned you can't even find it when you search phrases like "pokki.com windows 8 start menu", instead you get a pokki.com result with a manipulated page title like below which doesn't match our Page Title or Description.

Pokki brings back the Start Menu. - Pokki - Download Free ...

The Pokki Menu makes accessing and organizing your favorite apps, websites, files and folders more simple and convenient. ... Start Menu for Windows 8 ...

www.pokki.com - Cached

Any insight on this will help.

Thanks!

We have a page that's ranking well on Google, however the page is not showing up in either Yahoo or Bing. What's even more odd is that for Y! and Bing, the page doesn't return in SERP even when you explicitly search for it (e.g. homepage + name of page). Instead, the result that gets returned is our homepage along with a Page Title that's been manipulated to include the keywords, but the title is not what we have in our title tag.

Bing processed our sitemap today and I also manually submitted the URL, but it's still not turning up.

Any thoughts?

So right now, we have www.pokki.com that is really our app store that we're using as our home page (nm the bad title tags / metadata etc that we will be addressing as well). We then have a page that is "What Is" pokki page that is written more in the tone of what our new homepage is going to be. The existing home page doesn't give users an idea of what the product does so we want to change it so that our home page will be more contextual and it will then link to the app store page from there (instead of vice versa today).

What we will do is redo the content that is currently on the What Is page, which we will then 301 redirect  to www.pokki.com, then move the content that is currently on the homepage to www.pokki.com/apps.

From a keyword search perspective, the new home page should actually strengthen our positioning as there will be a lot more text/content that speaks specifically to the product.

Hope this clarification helps. I'm thinking there shouldn't be a prob, but just wanted to make sure.

Good question. From my understanding, there's no move in a sense of using redirects e.g. Meta Refresh. We're refreshing the existing domain page with new content, and what is now on www.xyz.com just will now be on www.xyz.com/product.

There was a mistake in my initial question, the sub-pages will not get shifted, there is only one page that is affected which is the current page on the domain. This is the case because those pages were already nested within www.xyz.com/product beforehand.

Our homepage currently speaks to a specific product and we're re-doing our homepage to be more about the brand which links to the product. The current home page has PA of 62 with thousands of links to the page. Question is are there any best practices around this or any risks?

So current page is:

www.xyz.com which we will be refreshing then moving the existing content

to

www.xyz.com/product so all the subdirectories gets shifted over 1

Thank in advance for the help!

Thanks Matthew!

We are creating a new homepage and the product are at different stages of development for different OS's. The value prop/messaging/some target keywords will be different for the various OS's for that reason. Question is, for SEO reasons, is it better to separate them into different pages or use 1 page and flip different content in based on the user agent?

We recently updated our website and during the push,  someone mistakenly 301 redirected "www.brandx.com" to "brandx.com" instead of the otherway. Since then, our website no longer turns up for the search "brandx" on Google. We have reversed the mistake a few days ago, but we're still not turning up, and we used to rank #1 in Google SERP. Could it just be due to timing between the crawls and that our www. site didn't make it in Google's index due to this mistake? We have submitted our new sitemap to google a couple of days ago as well, as a side we're still showing up #1 in Bing's results however. And it should still show up based on SEOMoz's SERP report.

Any help would help as I'm growing increasingly concerned.