Re-Indexing Pages in Google?

[P Brown]

Hi,

We have recently moved our site to Actinic and have had a dramatic drop in visits to our site in fact we went from 700 per day to 100 per day. Initially we just put it down to a blip or the time of year. Now vitrually all the visits we get are through Google Adwords whereas we were getting lots of generic before the move of our site and our orders dropped by 90%. We had an SEO Company advise and help us with the change over, we kept the same web address but changed from EKM Powershop to Actininc with hosting from the SEO Company.

Obviously all our page names changed when we moved to Actininc and we have now learnt that the old page names should have been re-directed then we would not have lost virtually all of our traffic overnight - is this correct!!

We are slowly recovering from this it has been like setting up a new site all over again. We now need to change some page names can anyone advise us how to do this without losing our google position and have history repeat itself.

I look forward to your replies

[Duncan Rounding]

The SEO company should've given you advise about redirecting your traffic from the old pages to the new ones. You should/could have also kept the same meta descriptions tags etc.

To minimise the effect in future you should configure an .htaccess file on your server (assuming you have linux hosting) to redirect the old page name to the new one.

You can find lots of information how to set up the required entries in the .htaccess file both here on the forum as well as on the internet.

I hope you've now got a new SEO company, and one who knows how Actinic works.

[leehack]

It is correct yes to preserve rankings, they should have if looking after current rankings, ideally named the pages the same and put a 301 redirect in place.

If you change page names now, you will need to 301 redirect from the old new name to the new new name, which seems like a right ballache unless the page names themselves are poor. If this happened a while ago, i think you will be best to stay where you are now as you will do more damage changing again. Sit tight and let things settle, it will happen.

[pinbrook]

at the very least add a 404 page not found to your htaccess, so all visitors are redirected to the index page.

[P Brown]

Thanks for your advice how do I do a 404 or a 301 could you point me in the right direction on how to do this - I want to rename pages in my site for better optimisation sooner rather than later and as mentioned do not want to drop of the edge of the net like last time.

Many thanks to all

[leehack]

You can find lots of information how to set up the required entries in the .htaccess file both here on the forum as well as on the internet.

Above as Duncan advised.