Change page name or 301 redirect?

naomimaya

I see there have been a few similar posts, but not in the last 3 years, so maybe something has changed?

I want to change a page name URL from www.mysite.com/CITY-weddings/ to www.mysite.com/NEWCITY-weddings/ because I moved to a new city and the keyword is no longer relevant. If I simply change the name, Google will drop that page from the index, correct? Then I have to start over with ranking? I'm wondering if it's worth it... my page is already ranked in my new city on page 3 so I wanted to redirect it...

If that's not possible, can I do an on-page redirect with HTML somehow? Does anyone know how that affects Google rankings?

I was also thinking as a last resort to leave the old page up, but move the content over to a new page and have a single link on the old page that says, "I've moved, click here for NEW CITY weddings", and link to the new page. Thoughts?

Thanks!
Naomi

Hikin' Mike

The only way to redirect your old to the new page is to add it to your .htaccess file. Unfortunately SmugMug doesn't allow editing it.

naomimaya

Do you happen to know where I can access that file? I know how to login with FTP on my other websites and have seen it before in the root directory of those sites, but not my smugmug one because of the way I had to direct the CNAME record to their server.... and I don't know how that works! I have my registrar login, and my own host for my other websites, to which the MX record also goes... but this has me at a loss.

Hikin' Mike

@naomimaya said:
Do you happen to know where I can access that file? I know how to login with FTP on my other websites and have seen it before in the root directory of those sites, but not my smugmug one because of the way I had to direct the CNAME record to their server.... and I don't know how that works! I have my registrar login, and my own host for my other websites, to which the MX record also goes... but this has me at a loss.

You can't. It's on SmugMug's end, not yours.