Hi everyone,
I made a website with the kiki theme but am having problems with the homepage. For some reason I am not able to change the URL because a folder name can’t be added for this specific page. It is possible for any other pages. This is an issue because it is significantly lowering my google ranking. Would anyone know what to do about this?
www.pianolessons-london.co.uk (this is the homepage)
Best, Natasha
Your home page needs to be the root directory of the site, otherwise browsers will not find it unless directed to the specific URL.
So, if you were to change your home page to https://yourdomain.com/myhome/index.html
Then a browser going to https://yourdomain.com will come up with a 404 error page not found and it won’t see an index.html (or index.php) at that URL.
Thanks, Ruyton. So do you mean to say that it is impossible to change the URL of the homepage? It used to be possible before when I was writing with another software and so I wondered.
Why would you do so? What is your intention?
To have the keywords twice as in the previous version.
Looks like you have your whole site massed into one directory…with a crazy menu…I would love to see how your directory system looks.
Keywords?
Version of what?
I really think you are getting confused about something.
Apologies for this lack of clarity.
The previous version of the homepage was this:
https://www.pianolessons-london.co.uk/Piano_Lessons_London.html
(written with iWeb, originally in 2009)
The current version is this:
https://www.pianolessons-london.co.uk/
(rewritten with RapidWeaver, originally in 2017)
The previous URL was working better for Google.
Not a pro - I thought it was supposed to be all in one directory?
Maybe that is your opinion, but frankly speaking, it’s wrong and against every best practices. The home page should always be index.html or index.php, so that you’ll get a clean url.
Well, the previous version was on the first page in Google results, this one is not. Frankly, it does not make any difference to me but it seems to be making a difference to the algorhythm.
All the page names should be index.html or index.php
And making the folder names repeat the root name is silly.
Current
https://www.pianolessons-london.co.uk/online_piano_lessons_london_nhs_offer/
should be
https://www.pianolessons-london.co.uk/nhs_offer/
I see. Maybe I have been following the wrong SEO tutorials then. Thanks for the advice.
SEO is always a moving target…and not always correct one day to the next.
Well, it seemed to be the 2020 advice. Will rewrite, thanks.
More 2009 than 2020…
A bit more to read about tidy links: How to use tidy links
And: Tidy Website Links | RapidWeaver Tutorials | RapidWeaver Community
You definitely should upload your sitemap into Google Webmaster: Create a Google Sitemap
Thanks. I have a sitemap but RapidWeaver does not seem to be generating sitemaps in a supported format. I can’t add it through console.
The previous version of your website had been in place since 2009. You probably built up several backlinks from other sites. That will give you a level of what Google calls authority.
That “authority” will help your SERP ranking a lot more than having multiple keywords in your URL. Especially if the keywords are duplicated in the same URL.
My bet is that your ranking dropped because when you redesigned the site and changed the URLs of each page you didn’t do any redirects from the old pages URLs to the new pages URLs. So you lost a lot of the old site’s SEO “juice”.
I would recommend setting up redirects from your old webpages to your new ones. This way Google will know that the SEO juice should be redirected to a new page. Make sure that the same content and meta tags are on the new pages so that you get all of the SEO benefits. I have some good live streams on SEO on my YouTube Channel