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natebinzen
06-22-2005, 10:51 PM
We’re redeveloping a site, which currently does not have index.html in the root folder as its home page (home is http://www.simonesgallery.com/estore/customer/). We intended to change that, but I got the following feedback from our developer:

"As far as issue of site root is concerned, we hold it for a purpose.
When visiting the site in my browser with google toolbar installed, I noticed that most of pages have a rank of 2 or more in google.
Around 30 pages are indexed by the Google. It is good sign to site's marketing. If we change the root of site all page rank and indexed will be lost."

It sounds like he’s saying any redirecting scheme would blow away the 30 Google-indexed pages – so does that mean we’d have to manually request and get updated links from all those 30 to get back to where we were? Or will any of them pick up the change and handle it in due course? And would such manual recovery be considered a routine task in any similar redesign?
Marcia
06-22-2005, 11:51 PM
Nate, let's take a look and see what's in the Google index for the site

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:simonesgallery.com&hl=en&lr=&c2coff=1&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2005-11,GGLD:en&filter=0

most of pages have a rank of 2 or more in google. No, most of the pages are in the Supplemental Index.

And Yahoo

http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&p=site%3Asimonesgallery.com&xargs=0&pstart=1&fr=slv1-&dups=1

It's also not the correct way to do that type of redirect, even if it were necessary

GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: www.simonesgallery.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
Host IP address = 66.70.114.62
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Receiving response...

Total bytes received = 421
Elapsed time so far: 0 seconds
Header (Length = 326):
HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF)
Date:·Thu,·23·Jun·2005·02:47:49·GMT(CR)(LF)
Server:·Apache/1.3.27·(Unix)·mod_throttle/3.1.2·FrontPage/5.0.2.2623·PHP/4.3.2·mod_ssl/2.8.14·OpenSSL/0.9.6b(CR)(LF)
Last-Modified:·Thu,·20·Jan·2005·08:30:56·GMT(CR)(LF)
ETag:·"26ef13-5f-41ef6c40"(CR)(LF)
Accept-Ranges:·bytes(CR)(LF)
Content-Length:·95(CR)(LF)
Connection:·close(CR)(LF)
Content-Type:·text/html(CR)(LF)
(CR)(LF)

Content (Length = 95):
<html>(LF)
<script>(LF)
(HT)location·=·"http://www.simonesgallery.com/estore/customer/";(LF)
</script>(LF)
</html>
natebinzen
06-24-2005, 08:36 AM
Marcia, I'm not clear about what the redirect problem is. A friend tells me that the 301 redirect is the perfect workaround for this. Is it more complicated than that? What's the issue?
Thanks, Nate
Marcia
06-26-2005, 02:11 AM
That isn't a 301 redirect, though.
hello2paul
06-26-2005, 02:11 AM
Nate/Marcia.

I have the exact same issue. My hugely expansive webpages(http://www.blogstudio.com/woodgnome/laser.html) are shortly going to get their own domain. I asked the very same question elsewhere about moving webpages to the new domain. I was told:

1. Leave them where they are.
2. Create more pages in the new domain and link between the two.

It is possible to do a 301 re-direct. However, I have not been told categorically that doing a 301 re-direct will NOT hurt your page rankings. And, as it's taken me some time to get those page rankings - I'd rather not take the risk of losing the traffic.