If you looked at the links of my blog, you would notice that before the title of each post, there is one more phrase, like "betting-tips", "betfair-trading", "videos", etc. It would be nice if the name of my domain resembled a betting or generally gambling word, but unfortunately when I was registering my website back in 2005, I hadn't heard of SEO (search engine optimization) and SEF links. I was just eager to register my favorite nickname as my domain's name. Therefore, I deal today with the problem that the word "jimmakos" creates, and that is killing my search engine friendliness.

A solution to the problem is to add several gambling related words in the links to my blog's posts, which will make search engines rank me higher in gambling related searches. The first and immediate way to achieve that was to include the title of each post inside the links, instead of some nonsense like ".../12-03-2008.html" or ".../article04-sec45-cat06". Thankfully there are helpful and free tools available online to make that task easier than it looks.

Now, while I created sections titled "Sports Trading", "Sports Betting" and so on I had the genious idea to create the same categories in each one of them. So, if you look in my administrator panel, you'd see 4 categories titled "Articles" but for 4 different sections. I have got about 12 or so categories like that! And as if that was not enough already, I have opted to create the SEF links without including the title of the section, eliminating the distinguishment between the categories with the same name!

For instance, published posts as "articles" under "sports trading" section appear the same as the ones under "sports betting" or "poker". That is "http://www.jimmakos.com/en/articles/.....html" and not "http://www.jimmakos.com/en/sports-trading/articles/....html". It starts to look like a mess.

While the easy answer to my problem seems to just add the "section" name into the SEF links, it gets a little more complicated. In case I do that, I would be changing all my links, which would result to a corrupted sitemap, hundreds of 404 pages to google's crawler and eventually receiving a huge penalty from search engines. The only page that would not be affected is the homepage, thank God! Additionally, Digg's submissions would also get "page not found" responses, several links to other blogs would lead to nothing and in the end my blog would sustain a major hit. Not to mention that a couple of advertisements are meant to appear in certain pages.

So, what am I supposed to do? I've come with the idea to create new categories with much more meaningful titles and start publishing new articles inside them. On the other hand, older posts would still keep their links and get their foreseen visitors. This article is one of them, under the newly created category "SEO" under the "Blog" section. I would hate to see this post appear under "articles" category. Enough is enough!