Hey,

 

We had a site for our company designed "professionally" a few years ago. It was a horrible 4 page html monstrosity. I swear it got no traffic and must have had negative page rank!

 

After a learning a bit of HTML/CSS i made a new site "Version 1" of my new site was very similar to what you see now, but at that time i knew nothing about SEO, and my structure was quite poor, all pages were in the root directory as products1-productname.php, products2-anothername.php

 

That did quite well, google indexed it, and i even got a "more results from..." bit and a subpage included when you search for the company name!

 

In "Version 2" (what you see now). I did a lot of work behind the scenes. I changed the structure to

/products/productname.php, added a bunch of title and alt tags, and structured all pages <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, <p>. I mean look at the code - its so neat and well structured, should be a web spider's dream!

 

But when i uploaded the new site, in my webmaster tools i got a bunch of 404's (because of the old pages) so i removed all the links and resubmitted. But about two weeks later, im still not back where i was. I dont have any "more results from..." or the subpage, and the sitemap.xml that i submitted, Google has indexed 0 out of 40 links.

 

Whats going on? Ive only got a PageRank of 2, when a competitor with less inbound links, less content and less indexed pages has a PageRank of 3.

 

What can i do? Any suggestions are much appreciated.

Have a read of this, should be exactly what you need A Basic Introduction To 301 Redirects

Thanks for the reply.

 

However i dont see why that would affect me, after all i used Google Webmaster Tools > Remove URLs to remove the old content from the index... so, shouldnt google just ignore the old URLs (removed from its index), and just focus on recrawling / reindexing the new ones?

 

But ill definitely edit my .htaccess if you think thats best.

in theory that would be good but that's not what happens, It will probably take a while for google to reindex everything.

 

As for your PR, you have to remember that PR only gets looked at every few months, its not like it is consistently updated every hour/day/week. Plus a lot more factors go into PR then just your back links, you need to look at SEO which if you have only just done in the past few weeks you won't see any change to the PR for a while yet.

Thanks for the reply.

 

Ive waited about 2 weeks and ive been resubmitting my URL and sitemap during that period to no avail, to ill have a go with the .htaccess then.

 

Months?! Ok, i was expecting days / weeks. I know this is a stupid question, as there are so many factors, but just from looking at it, what would you say sort of PR my site could be? Im thinking probably 3, maybe if im really lucky 4?

Hello mate,

301 redirects do what you want, they tell google to un-index your old pages, and index your new pages, in theory - if you do them right they transfer your PR across because you are unlikely to lose many inbound links. With the way its gone for your site I wouldnt hold out for anything more than PR2 at the moment, but you can build it up over time and work towards a PR4.

Just remember, having a PR4 shouldnt be your only goal as it doesnt necassarily mean that you will rank above your PR3 competitor

Instead of a post edited now 3 times, i think ill start again.

 

Ive added the redirects to my .htacess and all seems to be working OK, ill wait and see what Google thinks.

 

However, while researching .htacess, i came across this: Redirect /index.html to / very useful me thinks.

 

Using:

 

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

 

It works well for all my sub dirs, changing /products/index.php to /products/ - however, when i click to /index from one of the sub dirs i get a Loop Error, or something along those lines. Should i just change all my links to the homepage (/index.php) to just "/" or is there some clever code or something im doing wrong?

 

Thanks

Whats going on? Ive only got a PageRank of 2, when a competitor with less inbound links, less content and less indexed pages has a PageRank of 3.

 

Strong quality links from higher PR sites would have done the trick. If you happen to use the link: queryin Google search for the backlinks of that site - it is not at all accurate. Try using Yahoo Site Explorer to view a more detialed list of the backlinks of that site.

 

Focus more on your SERP - this is where traffic comes from