Yesterday I changed all of the Page ID names on all of my site pgs from index and page numbers to pg names. Then I used Sitemapper and made a new xml sitemap and submitted it to google. I went to my Google analytics pg and did a google fetch of the site and then submitted for index the home pg and all linked to pgs. Today when I do a google search and get a pg of surch results the one I did had one of my site pgs as the first result but it linked to the old site pg numger instead of the new pg name. How long does it take before the searches start yeilding successful results that have the correct url's Seems that since they all have been changed as it stands now no searches will give me any traffic

Do I need to add the sitemap xml file to the vsd application as an add the file? I checked my public folder on the server where my site resides and the latest sitemap xml file is there the sitemapper application properly uploaded it there I would guess that I do not need to have the sitemap xml file recorded into the VSD. would be good to get yay or nay confirmation on that issue.

Hiya Greg,

No you don't need to have anything added to VSD for Google to find your sitemap, just has to be uploaded and submitted as per the instructions Google gives you for it.

I would highly suggest, however, that you do redirects to all the pages you've changed names to so you don't end up with a lot of 404 errors (this is only if you have had this site active for a while, if it's a new site don't worry about it it will fix itself in time, but if you've had it up and it's been live a while, you should do this). You can do this either using .htaccess files or you can do this using the cPanel of your server if it's available. cPanel is pretty easy to do and you just redirect the old page to the new page and it's good to go.

Thank you Jo Ann I will attempt doing the redirects on the control panel The site has been up for more than six years so yes seems that the redirects are necessary.

I did this google search
WHPC's Free Estimate Bid proposal example
The first result was to the contract bid example which was my old pg 12
I clicked on that one and got page not found
I had put in the 16 url redirects on my control panel a couple of hours ago
Seems the redirects are not working
redirect list

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page1.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/reside … nting.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page2.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/reside … nting.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page3.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/commer … nting.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page4.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/specialtypainting.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page5.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/aboutus.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page6.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/testimonials.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page7.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/equipment.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page8.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/sitemap.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page9.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/garage … nting.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page10.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/beachh … tract.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page11.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/beachh … ngjob.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page12.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/freees … ample.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page13.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/compet … ample.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page14.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/beachh … ngjob.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page15.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/shanon … ngjob.html

http://www.workhorsepainting.com/Page16.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/zionch … ngjob.html
____________________________________________________

My site is contained in the public folder should my redirect urls contain the public folder in their path?

Should the redirects start working immediately?

OK I trial and error ed it out the from old url you just put in the last part of it example Page 1.html and use the full url listing for the new pg name in the redirect
So I now have the 16 redirects working and when they are done correctly they are immediately operable

Page1.html
http://www.workhorsepainting.com/reside … nting.html

Greg, as i caused this explaining seo to you.

I did also suggest you uploaded to SDRIVE under a new url and see which version got found best by google and the delete the other one, by redirecting a bit at a time.

Here's HOPING you kept a copy BEFORE making all those changes.

How about putting it back the way it was (you only changed it a few days ago)

Buy that second domain name THROUGH CC and upload to sdrive

Register the new name and sitemap with google

And then we will all sit back and watch your page ranking to see if i was right or not !!!!

By the way Greg, this version of your site has only been live months, not years, all those urls changed numerous times inbetween.

I kind of am trying to simplify by trying to get the current up and running site to generate traffic. For me it is more confusing and difficult to interpret two sites up. gets confusing. I am of a mind that getting the current one working well with SEO is the way to go and then venture out in expansion.

I am very happy that I now know how to do a redirect. For a couple of years I have been hearing about and talking about and perhaps needing some of them and I finally know precisely how to do one. And for that I am very happy

Glad you got it worked out Greg. Do keep in mind that it sometimes can take weeks to months for Goggle's bots to crawl things. Usually it's quicker than that by far, but it's always possible. The redirects will help so that Google won't have so many errors too when it crawls the new site.

One thing I can definitely say though, in the one example you give above, I'm hoping the changes you made were partly to remove spaces in the page names and url links? If not, I would highly suggest you give your page and file names a good once over and make sure no spaces are in them. They tend to mess up search engine stats, are harder for people to find if they want to just type them, and well the code is a whole lot friendlier to everything with them out. They Validate which is also very important, as spaces in file names do not validate well.

If you feel you need a space to separate a name, use underscores _ or dashes - instead of spaces. Search Engines will like you for that too

Hope you've had a great experience with all this, sounds like you're getting on with it pretty well. Good luck!