Google webmaster tools, and to a lesser extent, Yahoo Site Explorer and Live Search Webmaster Center all have a great array of tools at their disposal to help you ensure that your website doesn’t have any issues with being crawled, review the links that your site has built up over time and identify any potential impediments to your site ranking as prominently as it possibly can. These are all things things that can really help your websites Search Engine Optimisation.
However, there are a couple of items that I would really like to see integrated into these tools in the future, and I am sure that lots of other people have some great ideas about what else could also be included.
One of these would be some quicker method of letting a search engine know when you have changed a URL of a page. Helping clients create more user and search friendly URLs is a common task that we perform for many of our clients, but once you have done this, you have to wait for the search engines to come back to the old page, follow the 301 redirect (as long as you have done it the correct way) and then index the new page.
Sometimes if this page is one that isn’t regularly crawled, this can take days, weeks or even sometimes months – particularly if this page is in the now difficult to identify supplemental index (I’ve posted on how this index still exists with the post does the supplemental index still exist but in another form).
What I would like is some kind of mechanism like the web page removal tool to allow you to notify Google when this has been done (you can use this tool to remove pages more swiftly from Google’s index than its “natural” page dropping behaviour, as long as the pages are now blocked from the search engines or no longer exists). This way, as long as the page is properly redirecting, you could let Google know that a change has occured, and in a couple of days when they have had a chance to process this request, they can then index the new page and drop the old one much more swifly than they do at present.
The other thing I would like to see is linked to this, but I really think it could be beneficial to have a mechanism whereby you can let a search engine know that a domain has moved – this would be similar to the outlined mechanism above, but be for when a website has to change its main address rather than moving pages about within the structure of a website.
I’ve worked on sites that have changed domains on many occasions and it can sometimes be a painful experience. I’ve also worked on lots of campaigns that have come to us with 10 duplicate websites, which you then all redirect to 1 main domain to remove any duplicate content issues. However, because of the low value and authority of these websites, they often aren’t crawled regularly, and as such a duplicate content issue you have worked really hard to eradicate can still plague the site months after you’ve expended the effort to fix it.
I can’t see why if you have both sites verified in Webmaster Tools (or all sites when there are lots of duplicate domains) that you shouldn’t be able to press a button to let the search engines know that this domain has redirected to another one, and then put all of the value and trust of that website on the domain you want it to target – this would allow you to change domain, or redirect duplicate domains with the minimum of fuss and remove some potentially large impediments to a websites ranking.
This could eliminate a lot of the waiting time that is often required when removing this type of duplicate content issue for a website.
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