BTW, hope you are enjoying your visit to the States.

On MSN

linkdomain:whoisandrewwee.com -site:whoisandrewwee.com

2,828 results

If this worries you, there are plugins you can use to prevent duplicate content issues. Depending on how your archives are setup, you might lose traffic based on different keyword densities etc.

If you have the time, there are lots of things you can do, but I would stick with longer permalinks, and as someone has already suggested, use 301 redirects if you change things.

I’d looked through my indexed pages and I guess the post ID labelled ones didn’t seem to stand out too much.

I guess at a later stage when I’m more focused on the SEO aspects, I might revist it.

For the short term, I’d likely focus on the content generation aspect.

This is because if you remove them, it adds a huge MySQL overhead on your server.

The SEO benefit of making this change is minimal as it is only one of 100+ factors Google look at, and search engines are smart enough to tell the difference.

There might be some arguement on a niche site using Wordpress as a CMS, if you don’t want your content to have date relevance when listed in the SERPs, but for a blog that you intend to be long-term, I would stick to the longer URLs, even longer than the ones you already had.

you can follow a /keyword/category/post name link structure if you really want to.

For example, http://www.digitalkeiretsu.com/internet-marketing/category/post name.

One thing though, my personal preference is to go with generating good quality content, rather than spend too much time on SEO tweaking.

At the end of the day, you want human traffic that keeps returning to your blog, rather than 1000 hits from the search engines, but don’t come back because of inferior content.

If I’m keen to take it up, I’ll certainly let you know.

If you haven’t done so already, maybe you might want to blog about your offer and I’d be more than happy to send folks over to your site.

How do you ensure that your “404 File Not Found” error pages are configured to forward to an appropriate page?

Or how do you ensure that your theme’s “page forwarding” configuration is set correctly?

How fast you get re-indexed depends on the next Google bot visit to your site.

If you have access to awstats, it’ll show when the bots last visited.

I think the issue is more of what you’ll do with the pages that have already been indexed, so new visitors, finding you from the search engines, don’t bang into a ‘not found’ page.

I have another site that I may be able to try this on. Also all of my sites have Google Sitemap plugin, do you think this may help Google to re-index the pages quicker?

if you have tools to track backlinks to your more popular posts, you can follow Scott Jangro’s advice and set up the appropriate redirects.

It also depends how optimized your content and keywords are.
in the beginning, I didnt adopt a very content-focused approach, so losing those posts, while a little painful, doesn’t make a lot of difference in the long term.

bottomline: if you have anchor/pillar posts which people are coming to, or have been dugg, you’d want to redirect. else the benefits in terms of keywords (especially in the search engine’s eyes) would be worth the trouble.