CMS Made Simple Forums

I have put a whole website into CMSMS, but in a subdirectory. Setup pretty URL's and 301'd all the static URL to the new CMSMS ones. However before people accessed our site from www.oursite.co.uk, now they access it from www.oursite.co.uk/site.

Page rank before was 2/10, now it is 0/10 on the new URL for the homepage. I have used a pagerank checker service and they still show 2/10 for www.oursite.co.uk. Maybe I dont understand pagerank at all, but;

Question: Have/will we lose pagerank because the website sits in a subdirectory?

Hello,

Disclaimer : I'm not a pagerank specialist.

You had .uk/xyz URLs which are now 301 redirected to .uk/word/xyz
Well the word "word" should be carrefully choosen. It may level up or down the pagerank.
I think the actual question is : why have you installed in a subdirectory and changed your ranked URLs if you care about pagerank ?

Even if you prefer to install in a subfolder, hadn't you rather keep the .uk/xyz URLs ? this is easyly done with in server URL rewritting (a little .htaccess tuning).

Pierre M.

Disclaimer: Neither am I, nor do I want to be.

The only reason I mention this is because the google toolbar in IE used to show pagerank of 2 for www.oursite.co.uk but now shows 0 for www.oursite.co.uk/site/. Here is a snippet from the current htaccess;
There are 25 or so Redirect permanent from the old pages to the new CMS pages, then I have the CMSMS URL friendly stuff. As far as i understand it, Redirect permanent will, assuming it was a GET or HEAD request;

1. Send a 301 to the user agent, whether that is a robot or a browser, informing them that the page has permanently moved
2. Redirect an http request for a page to a different URL

The reason i installed in a subfolder was that the old site was php driven anyway, and the existing index.php would have conflicted with the CMSMS one.

Maybe I need to resubmit the website to google using the new homepage URL, maybe google hasn't done some sort of internal update on it's database since it's last crawl (which by the way was when CMSMS WAS installed). I hate all this google stuff, even more so that I work in a commercial entity.

Anyway, thank you Pierre for your response, see if you think my htaccess is doing ok things. I am thinking of spending 10 minutes re-rootingMT (made up term) the site to / rather than /site/.

Hello,

I think it is nice to install in a subfolder and use URL rewriting to have root-like URLs :
-you can prepare an "offline" site, as you have done.
-you can have several PHP web software installed at the same time.
-you manage your URLs and like it when they are ranked.

You may be interested by a thread about installing in a subfolder and rewriting the URLs.

Pierre M.

Hello Pierre,

Good thread, although im not sure if it applies in this situation.

Redirecting URL's and not losing page rank, i am assuming form various topics (here and abroad) would mean that if a user agent types in a specific URL e.g.

http://foobar.com/funky.html

Then that would, in the eyes of the user agent, not redirect to anything but stay as http://foobar.com/funky.html

Backstage it would be a different matter. A request to http://foobar.com/funky.html would redirect to http://foobar.com/site/index.php?page=funky and return the page as http://foobar.com/funky.html.

I am going to close this thread for the moment and post a question on google groups for pagerank and see if they have any specific answers. It may be that the root of the website is in a sub dir and not the 'real' root' which confuses the google toolbar, or maybe the google index hasnt updated. Will try a question on webhostingtslk.com.

Thank you Pierre for your assistance.

EBR