When you change your site structure radically like I did yesterday night – all links changed from static HTML files to dynamic PHP files – there are a few things to consider:
- Every link on the web will be broken and people wont be able to find the content again on my website;
- All the indexes on search engines will be broken, i.e. pointing to the non existent files;
- How fast will the new pages show up in Google search results?
All of the above being a reason to loose popularity and visitors.
With this in mind I tried to make the change as easy as possible to my faithful readers and with a simple script I managed to produce a table mapping all the old website URLs to the new ones. This way I could take care of the two first points above, but what about number three? That one is out of my control!
Surprise, surprise! Less than 24 hours later the new pages are already on the results page, and I didn’t tell Google to re-index my website.
The nice thing about this is that both links will still work and visitors will be happy. Now it’s just a matter of time before the old pages are dropped from Google’s index.
While looking at my website search statistics I noticed something really curious: if you run a search on Google for “chris schwarz blog” my blog will show up in third place! The first and second being Chris’ won blogs.
Check this out:
Categories: 
Tags: 
