Restructuring site - Will I get problems? Getting 404 Errors

17 Jun 07 11:20 pm

Hey Ron,

Some answers!

* I'm not familiar with what kind of statistics package ipowerweb uses, but there should be a way to find out what your 404 errors are and where they're being referred from. If you have AWstats in your statistics package you can click on the "404" to see referring pages. If they've got their own special stats package, you might want to ask ipowerweb how to do it :)

* To get a more relevant description in your Google results, you can try entering a meta description tag into the head of your pages. The problem is that Google is trying to find the content that is most relevant to the search query, and at the moment it thinks that "affiliate marketing website templates © 2006 www.buying-guide-for-digital-cameras.com. All Rights Reserved." is the most relevant. You could try putting the title of your page (which just happens to be your URL) in H1 tags to let Google know that "hey! This is important!". At the moment you just have it in P tags. You can also put the URL in the title tags of your page.

Remember, though, that not many people are going to be coming across your site through this search term, and the description google displays changes depending on the search term, so it's not really anything to be too worried about. If that description text is showing up when your page is listed for your major search terms, *then* you should do something about it.

* Don't get too confused between siloing your site and structuring your site. Structuring your site into folders and things can help you seo because the spiders see the file names, and it also keeps things sane when your site starts to grow larger. Siloing is more about the relationships between pages... which ones they link to, and whether those pages are relevant to each other. They're both good things to do, but they're not the same.

Will they have any negative effects in the search engines? So long as the spiders are still able to find your content, it shouldn't have any negative impact. If you change the location of a file that other sites are pointing to, you can either ask them to change the link or simply put a 301 redirect in place. So that any time anyone clicks through a link to your old page, it automatically redirects to the new page.

Just do a search for "301 redirect" and you'll find a bunch of people gagging to show you how it's done. :)

Hope that helps,
Mark

18 Jun 07 4:59 pm

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your speedy rely.

I am going to try to sort out the 404 errors with ipowerweb's help as you have suggested. They do use SWstats.

For the second question, google indeed puts an accurate desciption of my site but MSN and Yahoo do not. I have a meta description tag for each page. When I check keywords the right description comes up on MSN but Yahoo still gives the wrong description. Anything also I can do to get Yahoo to post the right one?

Sounds like the 301 redirect is the easiest way to go as I have over 50 links to ask changes for.

Thanks again,

Ron