(Continued)

With today’s plummeting Web hosting prices and more and more features being added, I don’t think I would mess around with a “free server”.

However, if you really really (!) want to go that way, I would NOT change the filenames in any of your site, since you will temporarily loose the PR of those files for the next 30 to 60 days, until Google re-updates its PR database, which sometimes occur at irregular intervals.

We recently had a client that came to us, after having changed more than half of his filenames in his site. A few weeks after doing that, he suddenly discovered his rankings had dropped significantly, especially in Google more than with Yahoo. Why he changed the filenames in his site is still unclear to me, but we had to rename them to their original filenames, which took quite a bit of time to do.

As soon as we did that, all their original PR (most of them were PR 5’s and 6’s) came back once we uploaded the renamed files to the server. About a month later, his original rankings came back.

Once a file is ‘sitting’ at a certain PR level, it will usually stay there unchanged, unless the whole site goes up or down in PR value. But if somebody changes a filename, or just even its extension (for example, from a .html to a .php), then you will temporarily loose the PR on that file. That's just the way Google works.

As for your robots.txt file, as I said previously, I have never worked with a free server so I cannot say this for certain, but what I can tell you is this: Generally speaking, most search engines today don’t take a free server very seriously and usually won’t rank such sites very high. Some may not agree with this, but I firmly beleive this, since we've had about 10 clients in the past year that were on "free servers" and were nowhere to be found in the search engines.

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