Something strange is afoot in the world of google page rank. I created the website randomdomainname.co.uk just about a year ago and didn’t link to it from anywhere. I added one link to the page on seomoz.org and subsequent to that another 13 links appeared.
All things being equal you would expect the site to remain low profile. This however is not the case, Google has upgraded the site to a pagerank of 5!!! I simply cannot believe it and it’s really pleasing.
More detail to follow early next week on the Yahoo! APIs for del.icio.us and for flickr – both of them are awesome, I have really enjoyed working with them this weekend.
In my previous post I talked about how I was reading into what can be done with mod rewrite files. I was quite amazed at what it is possible to achieve with rewrite files. The output of the work I have done means that the URL http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/433-a-strawberry-with-milk.html is just redirecting to http://www.cocktailmaking.co.uk/showcocktail.php?CocktailID=433 on the server but any crawler or visitor can’t tell that.
The methodology for doing this is really very simple with a .htaccess file but to truly do justice to the power of .htaccess will take a lot more than this short blog post. Unfortunately my host decided not to allow me to do this with .htaccess and doesn’t allow the RewriteEngine to run. I therefore had to use the mod rewrite functionality in Zeus.
There was very little documentation for this on the web but over a couple of hours it became clear that the methodology was really similar. Unfortunately I didn’t nail it completely. I had to add a bit of script in the php file to recognize the URL used to call the file and then pull out the variable number (a bit of a hack I know) but it works really well.
I am now planning to change the URL structure linked from the site and do some 301 redirects so that I can get the yahoo value from having the better URL structure without losing the existing Google benefits.
I have been working towards making my sites fully active served. This allows me the flexibility to do lots of interesting things I have been wanting to do for some time. For example in paper airplanes I would like to serve people adverts from different advertisers depending on the number of pages they have seen on my site. In cocktail recipes I want to make amazon recommends style recommendations when someone visits an individual cocktail.
A major limiting factor was the fact that although I had replaced all the links on my sites to point at the new active pages the old html pages were still drawing a lot of traffic from people linking to my site and legacy search engine results.
For some time now I have been wondering how to do 301 redirects since I understood they could overcome just this kind of problem in a way meta redirects cannot. It turns out that when you have a linux server you can place a “.htaccess” file in your directory which will permanently redirect traffic arriving at an old URL to the new URL you want accessed.
I worried of course that the new URLs would underperform in the search engines and I would lose all my traffic but today (less than a week after making this 301 redirect change) the entirely new URL www.paperairplanes.co.uk/planes.php is listed in Google Sitemaps as being the highest page rank page on my website and I have seen no reduction in search engine traffic to the site from any engine following the changes.
Good encouraging news for anyone who wants to change the URL structure of their site but not lose existing traffic in doing so.
