Question about backlinks & page names..... Will give thanks & rep for quick help!! :)

Hey guys,

Alright so I have about 90 different backlinks across the board on one of my niche sites. I am trying to rank higher for the world of warcraft macro keyword, whereas before I was trying to rank for world of warcraft hacks, and therefore have changed the page names. For exmaple:

It used to be "worldofwarcrafthacks.html" (world of warcraft hacks keyword) but I decided to change it to "worldofwarcraftmacro.html" (world of warcraft macro keyword). The majority of my previous backlinks were pointing to "worldofwarcrafthacks.html". Now, if I change the page name to worldofwarcraftmacro.html to try to rank for that keyword instead of world of warcraft hacks, will I lose all the SEO weight I had from the backlinks pointing to worldofwarcrafthacks.html? Or does Yahoo/Google weigh in total backlinks pointing to my site in general in my SERPs? Is changing the name of the page to worldofwarcraftmacro.html worth the re-getting of the backlinks?

Basically, I want the added weight of having the exact keyword in my page name to try to outrank one of my competitors, but I don't want to have to go through the 2-3 weeks of waiting for Google & Yahoo to index my new backlinks.

Also, will I get a duplicate content penalty for removing worldofwarcrafthacks.html and transferring it's contents to worldofwarcraftmacro.html?

Thanks,

Rob

One more thing... I won't ask what the "ideal" keyword density is.. because I know nobody knows this... but what is a "safe" keyword density to have?

Including my HTML and everything, I'm at around 5.7%, and visible text is at about 6.5-7%.. is that too high?

Thanks,

Rob

If I understand your question(s) correctly then, yes, you are going to lose your PR since the backlinks are no longer pointing to the page you want to rank for. In fact, if you literally changed the name of the page they probably don't point to any page at all. One of the things you want to keep in mind is that PR is applied to each page within a site and not to the site itself. In the future you might want to consider just redirecting your existing page to the new page. At least that way you still might get some traffic from the backlinks.

As for your second question regarding keyword density, the consensus seems to be somewhere between 1.5-3%. You start going higher and you're opening yourself up to being interpreted as keyword spamming.

So then even though I'm trying to change my keyword focus, for immediate traffic I will be better off just leaving it as worldofwarcrafthacks instead of changing it to worldofwarcraftmacros, right? But in the long run, (if I'm willing to wait for the new backlinks) changing the page name will be a great help to outranking competitors whose page names aren't the same as the keyword?

Basically, is having the page name the same as the keyword I'm trying to rank for a large boost, or is it negligible?

Thanks

Rob

Having the keyword in the page name is a plus. Having the keyword in the domain name is even better. That being said, if you?re going up against established sites with a ton of backlinks and PR then you?re going to have a tough time outranking them in the near term. Even when you do everything right from an SEO standpoint, the one thing you can?t change in the equation is the amount of time your site has been up compared to your competition.

Use a 301 redirect in HTACCESS pointing all queries for "worldofwarcrafthacks.html" to "worldofwarcraftmacros.html"

This will transfer the bulk of the link love you've gathered to the new file, and hopefully the search engines see a semantical relationship between WoW Hacks and WoW Macros so that the anchor texts will work too.

Then you can spend time building new links to the WoW Macros file and eventually put the WoW Hacks page back up with all it's links still intact .