Changing dynamic urls to static

[jaldridge]

I am going to be changing a significant number of dynamic urls to static urls. I am a little worried (to say the least) that I will lose my rankings on the new pages. I will of course be setting up 301 redirects from the old dynamic pages to the new static pages.

What sort of loss of rankings can I expect? And how long does it normally take for the rankings of the dynamic pages to be credited to the new pages?

Thanks.

[brian.mark]

We used to be #1 for most of our valuable terms. We did exactly what you're talking about here and we dropped out for a few days, then we've been holding steady at #4 for 3 weeks now, even with adding links to the new pages and having most of our old links changed. It can sure take a while. Of course, it also depends on what your competition is like and how well optimized your site is now. If you're winning by a lot, then you may go right back to #1 after the 301's kick in.

Brian.

[jaldridge]

Thanks Brian, but if you were #1 for most of your keywords did you really need to change your urls? This is what I am thinking, it it aint broke....

How much "weighting" do you lose with dynamic urls compared with static ones? Any idea?

[DMC_34]

Originally Posted by brian.mark

We used to be #1 for most of our valuable terms. We did exactly what you're talking about here and we dropped out for a few days, then we've been holding steady at #4 for 3 weeks now, even with adding links to the new pages and having most of our old links changed. It can sure take a while. Of course, it also depends on what your competition is like and how well optimized your site is now. If you're winning by a lot, then you may go right back to #1 after the 301's kick in.

Brian.

Brian, I dont believe a 301 transfers the Link Popularity to the new page. Do you know it does for sure? I have been thinking of doing the same thing for a few which rank very good.

DMC

[minstrel]

I have to echo jaldridge's question: If you are already ranking well, why mess with it (why fix what ain't broken)?

Spiders these days seem to do reasonably well with dynamic URLs as long as they don't require sessions IDs (or omit them for spiders and "guests") or have long strings of variables to follow... there are a couple of other current threads on this issue at this forum.

[brian.mark]

Originally Posted by minstrel

I have to echo jaldridge's question: If you are already ranking well, why mess with it (why fix what ain't broken)?

It was a server load issue. Having 100's and 100's of users hitting the database on our parts website (a few million database records are required to make that website function with lots of cross-linking for substitutions and such) was more than our dual Xeon server could handle with only 4 GB of RAM. I went to a static HTML site that gets regenerated every day and that's helped things out so much that we could use a much smaller server now if we needed to - single P3 would do it.

There are reasons to change other than SEO for sure. Instead of looking at upgrading to a new $22k server out of necessity, we were able to continue to use what we already have for quite a while longer until we really want to upgrade (looking at an SGI server towards the end of this year).

I couldn't say if PR / LP transfers through a 301 or not from experience. We don't have that many links at any time to really tell. However, Eric Ward (if you don't know his name, you don't know link building - he's a living legend) has said at SES to set up 301 redirects, then contact the best links and ask them to change it. Links should be about getting traffic, not PR, so you want them to work regarless if someone has corrected them or not.

That being said, PR and LP would only make sense that they pass at least some value through a 301. I have a lot of links that go to http://www.toolbarn.com which does a 301 to http://www.toolbarn.com/ (as does any directory that someone links to without the / on most any web server). If that didn't pass any value, nearly all of the links that we have would be pretty worthless. Maybe that's why our homepage is only PR4. Maybe that doesn't have anything to do with it. Hard to say... but it does give you something to consider.

I know this question always comes up at SES, so I'll make sure to be in the session in a few weeks to hear that answer again. The answer has been that it passes some value, but perhaps not at the full strength of a non-redirected link.

Brian.

[steve_avs]

I did this a few months ago, created thousands of static pages to replace the dynamic pages which required variables to be passed to them.

My experience was that my SERP's did not increase significantly (yet) however the number of pages spidered went up dramtically. It should be noted that I am in an extremely competitive online business. I now have over 35,000 pages spidered and Googlebot comes back frequently. I take this to mean that a less complex URL will be easier for Google to spider and therefore its going to spider more pages, more often.

Hope this helps,

Steve

[minstrel]

take this to mean that a less complex URL will be easier for Google to spider and therefore its going to spider more pages, more often.

Yes. Although you can also accomplish this by simplifying the dynamic URL without necessarily converting all the dynamic pages to static pages.

[jaldridge]

I have actually decided to leave my urls in a dynamic format. Tests that I have done show that the ranking does not really increase (as with steve_avs) but google DOES spider more pages. I have actually worked out a way to get most of the pages spidered, so I can keep my dynamic pages as they are. Thanks for everyones input.

[steve_avs]

Yes Minstrel, you are quite right.

In my case case I just generate very simple static pages that pull from includes. The includes contain all the dynamic content. This allows me to not have to change all the pages to make a change to the content or layout. Just change one or more of the includes. I think a lot of sites use this approach today.

Regards,

Steve