changing a url?
 

This is one of the first pages I put up when I started adult webmastering a little over a year ago--
http://www.smutmanor.com/buttons_etc/matureindex.htm
Obviously, I didn't know much about sub-directories, index pages, etc. As I've kept adding to this page, and linking to it from free sites and galleries, it's built up a pretty steady stream of traffic (not huge--roughly 500+ hits a day and growing), as well as a google pr3 and an increasing number of SE hits. I'd like to trade some links, submit it to some top sites, etc. But I know it would be better as an index page (ie. smutmanor.com/matureindex/). My question is, would it screw up my page ranking and the hits I get based on certain keywords if I changed it like that? Would it be better to just leave it like it is?
Any thought would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Lee (thrillho)

Lee,

As long as you move the page as it is... and dont change it too much till its re-spidered in its new home, you can do an htaccess permanent redirect.

This shows the SE spiders that the page has moved to a new home and that the original no longer exists..

it aslo catches any stray traffic coming via the old url

DD

Got it! I was thinking maybe htaccess might be able to do something.
Thanks loads, DD!

DD - If I wanted to do this to hundreds of pages and I couldn't wait too long before updating them - what would you suggest please?

If you have telnet or SSH access to your server you could make a symbolic link to your new page with the name of your old page and it would always serve up the current page no matter what URL the surfer went to.


create symlinks¸In a terminal window, type:
ln -s /path/to/real/file /path/to/alias

So in your case if terminal puts you in your home folder and your html file is in the web folder you would type this.
ln -s /web/index.html /web/matureindex.htm