The Search Engines Don’t Know You Changed Your Name

I’m working with a new client who contacted me after their website rankings dipped. The Director of Sales mentioned that they had recently renamed a bunch of web pages and asked me if that might have had something to do with the problem. As soon as she asked, I felt a thud in my chest. It’s never fun to give a client bad news. Yep. That had something to do with it.

Changing domain names or page names without doing a redirect is like moving and not putting in a change of address with the post office. You don’t have to put in a change of address but don’t expect your mail or your website traffic to find you if you don’t.

So what’s a redirect? It’s essentially a change of address for your website or web pages. It’s a way of telling the search engines that the website or web pages formerly names ABC are now named YXZ.

A “301 redirect” is a permanent change of address while a “302 redirect” is a temporary change of address. You’re probably thinking “Then I want to do a 301 permanent redirect.” But wait we’re talking about SEO so it’s not that simple. Read the article Switching to a New Domain Name Without Losing Your Google Rankings in the High Rankings Advisor to learn more.

If you need to redirect a domain name or individual pages, all you have to do is type in “301 redirect”, “directions for a 301 redirect” or “how to do a 301 redirect” and you will get lots of help.

Fortunately things will turn out okay for my client. The name change was a good idea since the new pages contain nice juicy key words in them. In a few months they’ll be back where they were and moving upward.

Tags: 301 302 redirect domain changing webpage

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 11:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.