I’m in process of updating the Urban Mixer website architecture to accomodate multiple cities. In doing so, URLs for my sites have changed. I had concerns about the Google Sandbox and losing our page rankings but it seems things are as strong as ever.

All of the content we had on the Urban Mixer sites (whether it was WWW2 which was the primary Plone site or WWW3 which was a Squid front-end for the Plone site on a completely different server and ultimately the place where most requests going to WWW were being redirected were geared to Vancouver.

In the new site for Vancouver, vancouver.urbanmixer.com I made some changes to structure. Firstly, the data was imported from the old site and nothing else. Secondly, the directory structure changed – Plone is case sensistive and I opted for lowercase directory names in the new site. (In the old site the directory name’s first letter was capitalized so /Events would now be /events). I did some fancy footwork with the 404 asp script on www.urbanmixer.com to compensate (by making directory requests lowercase then redirecting them to vancouver.urbanmixer.com) and then proceeded to redirect WWW2 and WWW3 to this site.

Okay, enough technobabble – if you want to know how to do this you can contact me. The end result is that our Google ranking is still strong and unhindered. The spiders are finding the content where they think they saw it last.

So here’s what people have been using to find us lately on Google:

Google