changing acatalog folder name

[RoofingWarehous]

V11.

Hello again! New to Actinic, etc and i have a quick question...

Following my domain i notice that by default that the online store folder is named acatalog...

Will it be beneficial to me to change this to a strong keyword to my site.

If i can change this, how easy is it to do, i dont want to cock up what ive done already. But i would rather do this now before i start sticking links out there...

I notice that in Network settings i can change the store folder name, would i need to change the "Catalog URL" and the "CGI Path"

Then would i also need to manually remove the acatalog folder fro my my server?

I hope this makes sense!

[leehack]

Just click the change button in web > network setup and actinic will do the rest for you.

[Duncan Rounding]

I would suggest a purge and refresh afterwards.

[RoofingWarehous]

What happens if i have links already out there pointing to the Acatalog folder? Will it redirect?

Thanks for your quick response.

Will the Purge delete uneccesary folders on the server? Ive only purged content so far lol. Like i mentioned im still discovering Actinic!

[leehack]

If you've already got the site live and got good rankings, you might need to drop the idea or do some 301 redirects via htaccess. If a very new site, just change it and accept that you might have a slight negative effect but with a long term gain. Actinic will sort all the site links out, unless you hard coded any, it's incoming links that are not adjusted, which is what the 301 redirects do for you (if needed, i expect not in your case).

[RoofingWarehous]

I think i might just leave it. The site is new but its indexing already and to be honest, its on the second page for alot of good search terms, im thinking that if i change acatalog the density might be too high for certain links?

I was just advised to change it to something relative to the site. But i see that the top sites for Roofing supplies have there folder as "Shop" etc...

Another thing, i have a folder on my server called "HTTP Docs" No idea why its there, it has a very old site on it, i take it i can delete this? As it has no relavance to my acatalog site...

[leehack]

That will probably be the main folder running your whole site. Leave the server alone unless you are 100% sure what you are doing.

[leehack]

Regarding the folder name change, personally i would do it, even more so with your site new and ranking on 2nd page as that is little better than page 10, what's to lose in reality? What you decide now is what the site will have for the next 5-10 years or more, no time for short sightedness IMO.

I recently completed a folder name change and some page name changes on a long standing very successful site and it has seen some amazing results that have surprised me a little. Well worth it IMO.

[RoofingWarehous]

Im just worried that it might have too high density, i guess thats what optimization is for!

Roughly how long will Google take to permanantly index the whole site? Atm i have like 16 pages indexed out of about 200, i know its early days still

[leehack]

Piece of string question David and somewhat irrelevant with regards to what you should be doing for optimal setup, you're so early on, do what is best and take a look at your results in a couple of months. If you are brand new, you probably won't see anything of any note for a while.

[RoofingWarehous]

I think it all comes down to me being impatient! Thanks for all the help though Lee i really appreciate it.

Ill get the site up and running to how i want it and get all my content on there, ill run IBP in a month then check back after another month of so at the results.

[leehack]

I understand impatient, believe me lol, but you have to think long term here. The site we changed last month had been online for over 10 years, that was a grab your meat and two veg scenario and cross everything I can assure you.

[Darren B]

just to tag on here

from your perspective Lee if you have a site that sells multiple product types (cabp.co.uk) what would you recommend, something as simple as "shop" or maybe a bit more canny.

I have had "acatalog" since V5 and its indexed well, i have considered changing it many times over the years and spending an age doing loads of 301 redirects but always been put off by the possible negative impact

Darren

[RoofingWarehous]

Wow yea i can imagine!

[leehack]

just to tag on here

from your perspective Lee if you have a site that sells multiple product types (cabp.co.uk) what would you recommend, something as simple as "shop" or maybe a bit more canny.

I have had "acatalog" since V5 and its indexed well, i have considered changing it many times over the years and spending an age doing loads of 301 redirects but always been put off by the possible negative impact

Darren

We had a similar conundrum Darren, suffice to say acatalog is probably the worst you could realistically have. My client ran a keyword search on his Google account and we looked at the top results, from that we found a couple of gems and I recommended we go with one, which he did. It was a generic term for his industry and products but also the second most searched term so fitted well with what we wanted to do and didn't duplicate domain name or anything like that.

Applying that logic to your products, it would be a word like buildingsupplies, upvc, plastic(s) or that sort of idea. If you are only changing the acatalog folder name, you can set a global rule on that I think, something like the following would do that I expect:

Redirect 301 /acatalog/ http://www.mydomain.com/upvc/

Our exercise was changing page names principally, we added folder name into that exercise and 'went for it' using my client's words. Changing just the folder name is an easier exercise as i understand as the global 301 will look after that.