a couple of questions

**Acorn** · 05 July 2016, 05:32 PM

Originally Posted by GStas

Im redoing an active website using existing page links and some of these have capitals for the page names eg www.example.com/Page1

Capitalise your entire URL / link. Is the site still accessible? If so, it won't matter a jot then to Google or SEO but note Google and SEO are case-sensitive and you are probllby on a Linux (Apache) server.

It is one way to find out if your server is Windows (doesn't matter) or Linux (does matter).

I would bite the bullet and go for lowercase, as enforced by Xara. Adding redirects or server-side fixes are prone to break.

Acorn

**Egg Bramhill** · 05 July 2016, 05:39 PM

Capitalise your entire URL / link.

I think GStas's problem is that Xara won't let you capitalise the Page Filename Acorn.

**Acorn** · 05 July 2016, 05:43 PM

Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

I think GStas's problem is that Xara won't let you capitalise the Page Filename Acorn.

Egg, I was suggesting this as a test in the browser address bar, not in the design.
Thank you for pointing out what I had missed,
Acorn

**Egg Bramhill** · 05 July 2016, 05:53 PM

Just pointing that out Acorn. Redirect's worked fine on the test I did on my Linux server. Updating the sitemap.xml file to reflect the changes to lower case filenames should further assist the SE's

**GStas** · 05 July 2016, 10:28 PM

Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

Just pointing that out Acorn. Redirect's worked fine on the test I did on my Linux server. Updating the sitemap.xml file to reflect the changes to lower case filenames should further assist the SE's

the original site is still live. Do you suggest i delete all existing pages of original site thru ftp and upload the new site with 301's in place?

**Egg Bramhill** · 05 July 2016, 11:04 PM

Yes, once you've tested it to destruction on your local machine. Either delete you old site files or better still move them to a subdirectory as a temporary backup. Change your robot.txt file to disallow SE access to the subdirectory. Place all 21 301 redirects into your .htaccess file. Go to one of any online sitemap.xml generators and load that to your root directory. Test - Test - Test. Good luck.

**GStas** · 06 July 2016, 12:40 AM

Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

Yes, once you've tested it to destruction on your local machine. Either delete you old site files or better still move them to a subdirectory as a temporary backup. Change your robot.txt file to disallow SE access to the subdirectory. Place all 21 301 redirects into your .htaccess file. Go to one of any online sitemap.xml generators and load that to your root directory. Test - Test - Test. Good luck.

thanks. seems the better way to go.
some pages have underscores and best to rename. eg
www.example.com/Page_1.html can be changed to www.example.com/page1.html

not sure if this is a big issue or not.

**Egg Bramhill** · 06 July 2016, 01:51 AM

No big issue. Sometimes it's helpful to use a hyphen to seperate the file name (contact-us.htm rather than contactus.htm) It would appear that hypens are better than using underscores for SE reasons.

page1.htm or page-1.htm would be better than page_1.htm

Xara also defaults to using .htm rather than .html, personally I tend to stick with the Xara default (.htm) but there's no reason not to use .html either, just remember that's what you've been doing in the past.

**GStas** · 06 July 2016, 02:20 AM

Originally Posted by Egg Bramhill

No big issue. Sometimes it's helpful to use a hyphen to seperate the file name (contact-us.htm rather than contactus.htm) It would appear that hypens are better than using underscores for SE reasons.

page1.htm or page-1.htm would be better than page_1.htm

Xara also defaults to using .htm rather than .html, personally I tend to stick with the Xara default (.htm) but there's no reason not to use .html either, just remember that's what you've been doing in the past.

thanks. this site is .html so ill leave as is.
thanks again