What Happens When I Change a Page Title
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This seems like the answer should be obvious. I have several thousand backlinks to my site. I am working on a redesign and I now using a the UKAO dropdown menu where I wasn't using a drop down at all.
This leads me to want to change some of the page titles to make them more readable in the menu, but I am concerned about my backlinks being broken -
There should be an easy resolve for this - at least I hope there is - could someone with more experience than me, shed some light.
Thanks.
This leads me to want to change some of the page titles to make them more readable in the menu, but I am concerned about my backlinks being broken -
There should be an easy resolve for this - at least I hope there is - could someone with more experience than me, shed some light.
Thanks.
When you refer to your backlinks being broken are you referring to, for example if you had a page where page title was about us and the link was:
http://www.mysite.com/about-us
and now you are changing the page title to about and the page path to:
http://www.mysite.com/about
If there was a backlink to that page, it would be broken. However you have a few options
in your .htaccess file you can redirect the about-us page to the about page as follows
your .htaccess file is located in the root of your directory structure.
Do you have the pretty urls option on? I would suggest putting that on as well.
Your other option would be to change your .htaccess file to redirect any page that does not appear on your site to go to a specific page i.e. your home page
for your concrete site, mysite.com/index.php is usually there and would bring you to the home page. Do not put the full site URL in the redirect in the .htaccess file
http://www.mysite.com/about-us
and now you are changing the page title to about and the page path to:
http://www.mysite.com/about
If there was a backlink to that page, it would be broken. However you have a few options
in your .htaccess file you can redirect the about-us page to the about page as follows
redirect 301 /about-us /about
your .htaccess file is located in the root of your directory structure.
Do you have the pretty urls option on? I would suggest putting that on as well.
Your other option would be to change your .htaccess file to redirect any page that does not appear on your site to go to a specific page i.e. your home page
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php
for your concrete site, mysite.com/index.php is usually there and would bring you to the home page. Do not put the full site URL in the redirect in the .htaccess file
Hope that helps :-)