Reorganizing Directory Strucutre of Website

Hi, when I started out I didn't think about putting my pages into a directory sructure. Now I have about 30 html pages in the root directory, which is a bit annoying.

10-20 of these pages have a page rank and drive most of the traffic to my website.

I really want to move these pages into another folder but I know if may destroy 60-70% of my traffic. At the moment I am averaging 250 unique visits a day (I'm a new website).

Is it worth it? What would you do? I'm thinking that if I am going to do it, I have to do it NOW whilst the pages are only a Google PR1. I don't want to leave it until they are a PR4 for instance.

Thanks. It might seem like a silly question, but I just want to know what the gurus think and get a second opinion. Or perhaps I am being silly for wanting to move them? One of the reasons is that I can see my site getting very big. Cheers.

 

keep the pages there, put copies in the new location, use redirects to move traffic from oldpage.php to newpage/ so you don't loose the traffic easy enough with a little bit of mod_rewrite or php.

also when your doing it, amke sure you put every page in it's own directory and call it index.html
so
/contact/index.html
then always link to it as
/contact/

it'll show as it's the default, and if you change to say "index.php" down the line on an upgrade you won't need to change your links

ps: do it now before you hit higher traffic, make sure you have redirects on, and stick to a format that works

 

Hi there, thanks for that. I like the idea about having a different categories with an index.html/index.php file etc. A redirect would only be useful for a few weeks until Google finds and indexes the new pages, but I will still be looses the page rank of those old pages, that's what my concern was.

I don't know php, so will have to look for simple ways of redirecting.

Thanks for your help,

 

Hi, I have just added this line to my .htaccess file and nothing happens- it is not redirecting:

redirect 301 /introduction.html http://www.anxietymadewell.com/way_to_happiness/introduction.html

Code (markup):

Can anybody tell me why it won't work?

 

Me again, hi.

I've heard that if you use mod_rewrite you are letting the search engines know that it's a permanent move and your page rank is automatically transfered over? Is this true?

I've just added this code to my .htaccess and it appears to work fine, so I shall start moving the files over soon, unless anybody tells me this is not the correct method.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^introduction\.html$ http://www.anxietymadewell.com/way_to_happiness/introduction.html [R=301,L]

Code (markup):