I have redesigned a website where an old website page seems to perform well for one specific keyphrase. The page has a messy url and looks less than beautiful, so I had hoped that the homepage or one of the other pages might eventually rate better and I could then remove this page. This hasn’t happened. Could the fact that one page in a domain rates well for a keyphrase hamper the other pages ranking for that same keyphrase?
Any and all pages that are relevant to that phrase are in competition with each other. Yes, it’s true that if you have multiple pages on your site competing against each other, that can reduce each of their positions in the SERPs in relation to other sites. That’s why it’s better, within your own site, to try to concentrate each topic or target keyword/phrase into a specific page (that doesn’t mean that each page can only have one target keyword, though!), so that none of that googlejuice leaks out around the edges and gets wasted.
Can you not redesign the old page and bring up to scratch with the rest of the website?
I have two problems with this.
- The url was constructed by a previous web designer and has spaces between the words. I want to replace this with hyphens
- For the page to be consistent with the other website pages it would need to be a php page whereas at the moment it is an html page.
I think it is the page’s simplicity and history that is making it perform. Unfortunately it is so simple that when users visit it, they aren’t impressed enough to place an order.
In that case, rewrite the page in PHP to your new standards, and put a redirect from the old URL to the new one. That way, anyone following a link to the old page will be taken to the new one, and Google will update its index to replace the old page with the new one.
In your .htaccess file, you just need something along the lines of
Redirect 301 /old%20filename%20with%20spaces.htm http://site.com/new-filename.php
Would redirecting mean that the new page would rank as well as the old one, or would this be lost?
All the googley goodness gets transferred as well. You might see a temporary dip as Google figures out what is going on and gets its index updated properly, but it should bounce back pretty quickly.
Brilliant, I really appreciate this advice, really helpful. One last thing, if the hosting company doesn’t allow me access to the .htaccess file, would redirect code on the old page work just as well?
A meta-refresh, you mean? It will work, but maybe not quite as well. Google understands that some people don’t have access to htaccess and so have to use hacks like this, so they do consider it as a redirect, but you might not get the full benefit that you would by doing it properly.
Yes, that was what I meant. I am intending shifting the hosting company anyway within the next month or so, so this would be a temporary measure as the new company does allow access to the .htaccess file
I think Google must have been listening in. Suddenly the page with the messy url has dropped two pages while the page I wanted to promote has leaped up to the middle of page 1. Well that’s going to make life a bit easier 