Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1251418-20130108203826/@comment-3508190-20130120221637

CzechOut wrote: But surely that would only be a temporary drop in rank, wouldn't it? Surely it would return after a few days? And is Google rank really more important than local searchability? I'd trade a working autosuggest function for Google rank any day of the week (providing I wasn't absolutely tanking my Google rank for time immemorial).

I don't know any specifics about w:c:tardis: but it's probably safe to assume that what's true for most web sites is true for the tardis as well: The bulk of visitors do not come from the site itself but from the outside and a considerable - maybe the largest portion - come from a search engine. So renaming pages - and thereby destroying the search engine's index - is generally a bad idea. It's possible that the drop in traffic is only temporary and that the crawlers catch up soon, but why bother? That's really not one of those things I'd want to find out the hard way. It's better to err on the side of caution when it comes to search engines!

And I'm really sorry for replying so late. It's been a bit hectic over here :(