Rewriting your websites URLs is an important and proven method for successful SEO. There are four core reasons for this, they maybe staring you in the face but to some they maybe not so obvious, please read on to see how a re write can benefit your site.

1. Duplicate content
2. Google reads keywords in the URL
3. Combine strength of multiple sites
4. Links go to 2 different places

Duplicate Content – Having 2 URLs that point to a single page can be seen as duplicate content even if they are situated on the same domain. The most common error is when you have the URL www.seoconsult.com/index.html and the standard www.seoconsult.com both displaying exactly the same site.

Keywords in the URL – Having your keywords in your URL, even if they are a sub domain is extremely advantageous from a search results perspective. This is the first place a crawler will look and the likelihood is you will gain results faster this way than any other form of search engine optimisation,

Combine strength – If you have used more than one site on more than one domain, or you have a .com and a .co.uk site that are exactly the same, the best thing you can do is to combine the strength of all the sites. Through a 301 redirect Google will see that the sites have all been permanently moved to go to one site, merging all the PageRank and authority that the others have gathered, thus creating one powerful domain.

External linking – When outside sources are organically linking to your site, there is a chance that some could link to www.seoconsult.com/index.html, this leakage could be detrimental to your long-term authority and PageRank.

The best way to solve all of the above issues is via a htaccess file if you’re on an apache/linux server, or through the control panel on a Microsoft server. Both these methods can put permanent forwards from one page to another and here at SEO Consult we ensure that every client takes full benefit for this service.

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