I read somewhere that you should always use dashes(-) in a page title, is this true and should this rule be applied to the file name or the title in the page inspector?
Thank you for your assistance
John
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What a coincidence! Just published an article about this today. Please read http://www.dtp2.nl/Freeway-Pro-SEO/url-page-title-freeway-pro.html
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I read somewhere that you should always use dashes(-) in a page title, is this true
No - not really as the Page Title is what appears in the head of the Browser window and it should be descriptive of the page/site but is not limited to certain characters.
Where you have to be careful is in naming the actual file itself ie index.html Here you should stick to Alphanumeric characters such as a-z, 0-9 , _underscores and -hyphens. Punctuation marks are not valid characters (except for a single full stop .html, .php) This also applies to the other files that you use on the web such as graphics, PDFs, MP3s etc - avoid space characters as well so ‘my file.pdf’ can be a problem where my_file.pdf is not.
An example of a good page/file name would be black-labrador-puppies-for-sale.html - if you were selling black Labrador puppies. Not good if it was Dalmation pups.
David
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Hello both, thanks for the help , i read the paper from DTP2 and i have the dreaded 404’s as per
…Changing this after your website has been submitted to the Search Engines will produce 404 pages and this has to be prevented at all costs.
Is there any way to repair this damage now?
Thank You
John
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Exactly as I told and warned you for, if you change the page name after it has already been indexed by the Search Engines will do this. Be aware that if Google re-indexes and finds the 404 pages you will loose rank soon!
Couple of options.
Change the names back to what they were and only do this for future pages.
Make a robots.txt file redirecting the old pages to the new pages so you can still use the new names.
If I’m not mistaking this is what you robots.txt file should look something like:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html
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If you want to make such a change and preserve your rank, you will need to set a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new. Make (or edit an existing) .htaccess file in your server’s document root folder, and (using a plain-text editor) add one line per redirected page, like this:
Redirect Permanent theoldname.html the-new-name.html
This will preserve any existing Google mojo.
Walter
On Apr 2, 2012, at 10:40 AM, DTP2 wrote:
Exactly as I told and warned you for, if you change the page name after it has already been indexed by the Search Engines will do this. Be aware that if Google re-indexes and finds the 404 pages you will loose rank soon!
Couple of options.
Change the names back to what they were and only do this for future pages.
Make a robots.txt file redirecting the old pages to the new pages so you can still use the new names.
If I’m not mistaking this is what you robots.txt file should look something like:
Redirect 301 /oldpage.html http://www.example.com/newpage.html
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Ahh, my bad. No robots.txt file, but .htaccess will do the trick.
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Immediately updated my article with this information.
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This all came about as the original web site was set up using iWeb and now as part of my learning process to use Freeway I have made this major blunder, however if i change the Freeway file names to be as they were in the iWeb site will that not achieve the same thing or is the .htaccess file still necessary?
once again thanks for this valuable help.
John
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If you change your Freeway page names into exactly the same as they were in iWeb it should be working again.
Don’t wait too long, because if Google indexes now it will not find the original pages and later on you will change everything again. This will not benefit your rank.
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Thanks, have changed the file names to those that i used in iWeb except i cannot change the index file name in Freeway. In iWeb we could name the Home page anything you wanted as iWeb created it’s own “Dummy” index.html, so i have uploaded a 1 line file with the redirect for this page. However, is the file supposed to be named .htaccess as i cannot insert the period before the “htaccess”
Thanks
John
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First, there is no reason that you have to use the suggested filename that Freeway auto-generates when you create a new page. The filename and the page title can (and should) be entirely uncoupled from one another.
Your home page can have the filename index.html while that page has the title Welcome to Uncle Pat's House of Falafel. That is why there are two separate fields in the Page Inspector – one for each property.
Secondly, the Mac will not let you create a file locally with the filename beginning in a dot, because such a file would immediately disappear (files that begin with a dot are traditionally invisible on Unix). You can enable the Finder to see hidden files with a command-line trick, but you really don’t need to do this. Simply name the file htaccess, use an FTP application to move it to your server, and rename it there. (It may immediately disappear, since your server is 99% guaranteed to also be Unix.) All the major FTP applications have the ability to show hidden files (it will be lurking in the View menu or similar) and once you turn that on, you should see the .htaccess file again.
It’s a good idea before fiddling with .htaccess files to turn on this (Show Hidden Files) feature. Many hosting providers automatically add an .htaccess to your Web root, and some use it to configure aspects of your service, so adding your own might overwrite that host-provided version, which could degrade your service – cause password-protected areas to be wide open again, log views to fail, etc.
Walter
On Apr 3, 2012, at 8:51 AM, ejw wrote:
Thanks, have changed the file names to those that i used in iWeb except i cannot change the index file name in Freeway. In iWeb we could name the Home page anything you wanted as iWeb created it’s own “Dummy” index.html, so i have uploaded a 1 line file with the redirect for this page. However, is the file supposed to be named .htaccess as i cannot insert the period before the “htaccess”
Thanks
John
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Walter,
Thank You i was aware of the significance of the difference of Title and File name, however my big learning curve has been on the fact that i changed them between iWeb and FW… i did upload the htaccess file and i have managed to cause an issue with my web hosting as now the web site is not accessible … am working with my hosting company on this one now…
John
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I think I have a similar issue. I took over a site that was originally done in WordPress. Every once in a while, I come across a 404 error when I accidentally type a wrong url. This 404 error is from the old WordPress site.
I don’t know how to fix it or even how to re-create it, since I don’t have any of the original WordPress page names. There were only a few pages on this WordPress site, and it’s probably not worth the trouble even if I could fix it. But, if anyone has any ideas I’d love to hear them. It’s definitely something to keep in mind for the future!
Doty
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I think you should be able to find the problems/url’s in your statistics page or if you use Google webmaster and analytics. Then if you want you can fix this in your htaccess file.
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I doubt they had their site connected with analytics. I’m not familiar with “Google webmaster.” But, perhaps I could connect analytics to this site and then use google to index the entire domain, even those pages that I didn’t do? Is that what you are thinking?
Thanks for the idea.
Doty
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Google Analytics can’t track 404 errors at all, unless you have somehow put the GA bug on your 404 error page. A quicker place to start looking would be your hosting provider’s control panel. There you will most likely find the error log and access log. Look in the latter, find all of the requests that resulted in a 404 response (missing) and make a list of the exact URLs that were affected.
Some of these are going to be just utter garbage – someone typed incorrectly, or more commonly, a script tried a variation on an existing filename (this is called “fuzzing”) to see if the server throws an interesting error message that would help an automatic intrusion script to gain a foothold into your machine. But others will be genuine missed pages with the old addresses.
This is going to be a bit of a slog, because everything that happens to your server gets logged, so you have to filter out the successes and focus on the errors. Hopefully your host has a nice analytics package installed, so you don’t have to do this by hand in a text editor.
Walter
On Apr 4, 2012, at 10:14 AM, Doty wrote:
I doubt they had their site connected with analytics. I’m not familiar with “Google webmaster.” But, perhaps I could connect analytics to this site and then use google to index the entire domain, even those pages that I didn’t do? Is that what you are thinking?
Thanks for the idea.
Doty
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If you use Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics on the website, it will monitor everything people do when they come to your website. Even if they try to visit url’s or files that are already gone for quite some time this will become visible in the stats.
The great thing is that you do not have to do anything with this information. You can just activate it and look at the data that it collects.
If the data start to make sense to you you can start to take appropriate actions to improve the current situation.
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I made a spelling mistake on a URL so tried this redirect method. It is a php page.
When I put the code below the site fails. When I remove it it comes back to life.
Presumably because it is php?
If so what else needs to go in there?
best wishes
Richard
If you want to make such a change and preserve your rank, you will need to set a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new. Make (or edit an existing) .htaccess file in your server’s document root folder, and (using a plain-text editor) add one line per redirected page, like this:
Redirect Permanent theoldname.html the-new-name.html
This will preserve any existing Google mojo.
Walter
On Apr 2, 2012, at 10:40 AM, DTP2 wrote:
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Could you quote exactly what you put in there? If you add four spaces to the left of whatever you write here (in either mail or the Web) the line will become “code formatted” on the Web so your text won’t be misinterpreted by the formatter.
A URL cannot ever contain any spaces, so if you want to redirect from a path that contains spaces to a properly formatted one, you’ll need to test out one of these escapes:
Redirect Permanent path\ with\ spaces path_without_spaces
Redirect Permanent path%20with%20spaces path_without_spaces
Redirect Permanent "path with spaces" path_without_spaces
One or another of those might work.
Walter
On Apr 6, 2012, at 7:16 AM, Richard Lowther wrote:
I made a spelling mistake on a URL so tried this redirect method. It is a php page.
When I put the code below the site fails. When I remove it it comes back to life.
Presumably because it is php?
If so what else needs to go in there?best wishes
RichardIf you want to make such a change and preserve your rank, you will need to set a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new. Make (or edit an existing) .htaccess file in your server’s document root folder, and (using a plain-text editor) add one line per redirected page, like this:
Redirect Permanent theoldname.html the-new-name.html
This will preserve any existing Google mojo.
Walter
On Apr 2, 2012, at 10:40 AM, DTP2 wrote:
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