Changed dynamic to static

Marketing
1

ok, on my site I changed my urls from index.php?page=about to the style /about/.

It works all fine, then i realised Google has indexed both copies so it has a result for page= and the newly formatted one as well.

As a result my site has plummeted in the search results and I’m pretty sure this is why.

I have attempted to set up permanent redirects but I am really struggling to get it to work along side the other rewrites.

I sent an email to Google about 3 weeks ago about it and have yet to hear back.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

2

One thing that may help is to put
<link rel=“canonical” href=“http://website.com/about/”>
in the head of the document - this tells Google the real URL of that page and the one that you want to be indexed.

If the old URLs and the new URLs both point to the same page, that shouldn’t affect your ranking - Google is usually smart enough to figure out when alternative URLs are being used.

3

The first thing the page URL should be with extension i.e. href="http://website.com/about.htm or php

After completing all the URL’s update your site map and resubmit in to webmaster…

4

(a) that doesn’t make any sense
(b) even if it did, it’s wrong.

Having a file extension (eg .htm or .php) is not necessary, either for SEO or, in general terms, for site architecture. Google doesn’t care if you use a page extension or what it is. If you can manage your website so that you don’t need the extension then this improves the user-friendliness of your site (people don’t need to remember which filetype you’re using) and it improves the maintainability of your site, because if you change to a different file format (eg from .php to .asp) then you won’t need to change all your links.