Duplicate pages w/different file names

[hiw]

Hello Everyone! I'm a newbie to this forum and a new internet website owner.
I would like your assistance, please regarding page names and duplication of that page.... I decided to rename several catagory and product pages with a more descripton name, in hopes to optimize the pages for search engines to find them. I realized after publishing these pages that, obviously my old page names were listed by MSN at a good postion.

1. Im afraid to remove my old pages, because I risk loosing my MSN position, the next time they crawl my site.
2. I would like to leave both pages for the time being, until they are recognized by the search engines. But if I leave both pages (exact content but with different names) won't i run the risk of being kicked off for spamming?
3. Would it be best to stay stay with the old pages and abandon the new ones, even though their file names are a bit more descriptive of the page?
4. If I delete the old pages, would I have to start all over and wait as long as I did (online for 7 mo.) for the search engines to find these new pages?

THank you in advance for any help you can send my way... HIW

[phpmaven]

IMHO, there is nothing to gain and everything to lose if you change the names of your pages. The search engines put very little weight, if any, on keywords in file names. I would just leave your page names as is.

[hiw]

Thank you for your reply!
Since I have both page online (only a day) I'll work on reverting back to my old page filenames.

Out of curiousity, would this situation be considered spamming, having two pages with identical content, but with different page filenames?

[DarkMatter]

I'm having the same dilemma....I created some filenames with undescores instead of hyphens, and even though the impact is small i still need every little bit. Plus, search engines can change their algorithms and I tend to think decriptive filenames are better.

[Irishrose]

What if a site is being updated, some new pages are added and some of the older ones are outdated by now and should be removed - but those old ones have been indexed while it will take some time to get the new ones indexed - is it worth then leaving the old ones for some time? Especialy in case the navigation of the site has changed and some of them wouldn't even be linked properly any more, except to the home page? At least, unlike the situation described above, there is no risk to be punished for spamming - but there can still be consequences for having pages with broken links, right?

[phpmaven]

If you are creating new pages, then it makes sense to name those pages something logical. I think it looks cleaner and it makes maintenance easier, but if you think that you will get a boost from the search engines from keywords in your file names, forget it. What WILL help is keywords in anchor text whether inside or outside of your site.

If you have pages that are currently indexed and you don't want to lose the traffic then DON'T RENAME THEM. You could of course 301 the old pages to the new (I have old pages out there from years ago that still get hit), but why risk losing traffic just to make your page names look prettier.

The problem with duplicate pages is not that you will be penalized for spamming but you will lose one of the pages when the engines see a duplicate. You have no control over which one they will delete.

Bottom line: do not rename pages unless you absolutely have to. Believe me, I learned this lesson the hard way. I'm sure you will get some who will tell you that they renamed all of their pages and 301'd all the old pages to the new and EVENTUALLY the engines updated, but why take the chance? No reason I can think of.

[PhilC]

One of the duplicate pages with different filenames would be filtered out of the rankings by Google, and you wouldn't know which one would be kept - the old or the new. It is likely that most engines would assume that duplicate pages with different filenames, and that are linked into the site, to be iffy, though they may not do anything about it.

If it were me, and the only good rankings that I had were in MSN, which doesn't have such a big share of the search market yet, I would change the filenames to targeted words and hyphens (not underscores). I believe in getting as much right as I can, and URLs do play a part in the rankings. I'm also a believer in not interfering with top rankings, but MSN isn't big enough yet to stop me doing it.

I'd think more than twice before interfering with top rankings in Google though, but I can say that I've changed underscores for hyphens with top ranked URLs, and the new versions have ranked as well as, or better than, as the old versions - as they should. I wouldn't be so keen to do it with a ranking that really mattered though, but if it was ranking at the top, it wouldn't need the change.

There are no negative consequences for having pages with broken links, IR.

As for outdated, top ranking pages, I'd leave them intact because they bring traffic, and, if necessary, I'd incorporate something for people who reach them from the engines. For instance, if the content has been superceded by a new page, I may state that at the top of the page, and provide a link to the new page. Or if the page is just old hat, then maybe I'd put an original date on it, and leave it as it is. What I wouldn't do is throw away top rankings, unless I had a huge site, with a mountain of top rankings.

[PhilC]

Correction to my previous post:

If the page with broken links doesn't have any good links on it, then it will not get a fair share of PageRank.

[lots0]

Im afraid to remove my old pages, because I risk loosing my MSN position, the next time they crawl my site.

if it is just a few pages. I would use meta redirects and no index tags on the old pages until all the SEs have the new pages indexed.

that way if you did see a drop in ranking it would only be for a short time and all things being even, you should pop right back to where you were on the rankings.

But this is just me, others may do it different.

[phpmaven]

Some of you may have seen this before and it was written several years back but I think it has some of the best advice I've seen on the topic of file names.

Cool URIs don't change (http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html)

[hiw]

Great info! Thanks everyone for sharing your expertise!!

hiw