Removing ACATALOG completely

[jans-site]

Hi all,

Firstly, thanks for all of your interesting and informative posts. They have been extremely useful and this forum is one of the best I have ever come across. It is really great to see how everyone helps each other out here, a real community! So a pat on the back to everyone!

Now, I have a quick question, I use IBP (internet business promoter) to analyse my site pages for SEO. And IBP always reports that the keywords I include in my page urls need to be brought closer to character 1! Here is how they look now:

http://www.domainname/acatalog/blue-widget.html)

Apparently the keywords in the domain name need to be as close to the top as possible. I don't want to change our domain name though, but the only other way I can see of bringing the keywords closer to the beginning of the URL is to remove the ACATALOG completely and have the pages indexed at the root, therefore looking like this:

http://www.domainname/blue-widget.html

Does anyone know a simple way to achieve this. I have found numerous references to this, but as a non-developer and a newbie to Actinic, I would appreciate a step-by-step guide if possible? Many thanks in advance.

Best wishes,

Jan

[leehack]

Jan

It would take somebody a hell of a long time to write step by step instructions, amalgamating the numerous posts will be your best bet by a long way IMO. You also get a number of different ideas then also.

There are numerous actinic sites that list highly for their chosen marketplace and they all have "acatalog" in their URL's.

[jans-site]

Cheers Lee,

I appreciate your suggestions. I am not a designer though and I find a lot of the stuff on these forums goes way beyond my comprehension, I am very dedicated to learning more, but it takes time. Anyway, I will leave this issue until later. I am still trying to fix problems with a site which was delivered to me incomplete and in an un-managable state! Script errors, etc, too many templates, and lacking the SEO functionality I paid for... Designer is ignoring emails now, so am trying to pave the way forward with very little actual knowledge... Anyway, thanks again for your help. I really appreciate it.

Best wishes,

Jan

[wjcampbe]

Jan,

IBP is a tool - not the bible. It offers suggestions, not commands.

It suggests that a minute improvement in ranking could *perhaps* be achieved if the acatalog was removed from the address of each page. Any possible ranking improvement is not worth the hassle you would face as an inexperienced user trying to maintain an non-acatalog site setup.

Keep your site standard Actinic, easy to operate and maintain, and invest the time you might have spent fiddling with /acatalog/ into obtaining relevant links from established websites.

JMHO

[george]

Would the marketing issue (making Actinic sites recognisable) stop Actinic making this an aim for the future? (ie: dropping the acatalog).

[Mike Hughes]

I'm pretty sure this is already on the wishlist. Not only removing 'acatalog' but also the possibility of calling it something else like 'Keyword1'.

Mike

I went to search for where I saw this and it's buried in this thread: http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=9222

As for the acatalog bit being marketing for actinic, only actinic aware people know about it so it's unlikely that the loss would be a problem for them