URLs: To Change or Not to Change
-
Hello,
We recently launched a redesigned site in Drupal in December of last year. We are an eco-travel company. My current URL's look like this:
/africa-and-middle-east/kenya-tanzania
/central-south-america/galapagos-islands
My pages have good term targeting grades, and the rankings for the terms we are targeting - "kenya and tanzania safaris" and "galapagos islands cruises" are decent, but not great - most are on page 2 or 3. The one URL where I targeted our most important term, "amazon river cruises," I am still on page 2.
/central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises
My questions are:
- Did I miss an opportunity with the rest of the URL's, and should I consider changing the rest to more targeted terms with 301s? Since the new site launched in January, perhaps I have not given enough time for my new URL's to index and mature. Would it be easier to set up landing pages with unique article content that targets terms such as "galapagos islands cruises" and "kenya and tanzania safaris"? If so, how can I do it in such a way as to not "compete" with the pages I want to drive them to?
This also raises the question of redirecting the same URL twice i.e. I would have 2 redirects in place for the same url e.g. from the former site to the new site, and yet another redirect to the most-recent URL. Is that a problem?
Sorry if I've asked too many questions in one post.
Any advice appreciated.
-
Have you looked at how the pages are externally linked to by other sites? Compare that to who does rank on page one and you might find some opportunities. IMHO, 301ing a url is really throwing in the towel.
-
Hi! I'm following up on older questions that are still marked unanswered. Are you still looking for an answer, or have you gone ahead and implemented (or deciding against implementing) the url changes? Do you have any lessons learned you can share?
Thanks!
-
Damien,
Thanks very much for your input. I have been doing a lot of reading on content siloing, and my question (FINAL
is, how similar or dissimilar should the URLs and on-page SEO on the landing pages be from the product pages? For instance, if I'm targeting "amazon river cruises" and "galapagos islands cruises" on the product pages, should I consciously seek to use variations for the landing pages, such as "amazon river tours" and "galapagos islands tours"?
Best,
Carlton
-
Commerce pages must still rank and therefore will still need to be optimised whichn will include unique content. Pointing from the blog content to the e-com page is good but don't use the same anchor text and URL throughout the site. Spice it up a bit
-
Dan, Damien:
Thanks for your answers - they were very helpful in being "forced to consider" this issue. I'm basically planning on paying a service to generate 125+ articles for me over 4 months, and was trying to decide on the most beneficial way to house them. The service recommended building landing pages aimed at each of those terms, but we don't want content pages outranking commerce pages - sales are what it's all about, at the end of the day!! That said, what would be your recommendation?
My thinking was to publish them under the blog under the most relevant categories, then push to the authority pages via anchor-text links.
-
The more times you redirect a URL, in my opinion, the more value you lose. The URLs above look fine. Don't forget your URL isn't the only ranking factor. Are all your on-page elements as good as they can be? Does the content on the page fit with what the URL is telling us?
DD
#edit - Agree with above post - double-posted!
-
Never do a double 301 redirect. Google hates that. Every redirect should point one URL to it's new location.
Don't make landing pages to target specific phrases if they aren't the page you want to drive the traffic to. Honestly, the keywords in your URL means about as much as a drop of water in the ocean. Just adding keywords to your URL is not going to get you from page 2 or 3 to page 1.
The important thing to do is keep a consistent URL structure throughout the website. As long as you are doing that you're in good shape. Also, I would make sure the directories one level up from your final url's are all pages as well. By that I mean /central-south-america should be a real page of content if it is part of the url for /central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL Indexed But Not Submitted to Sitemap
Hi guys, In Google's webmaster tool it says that the URL has been indexed but not submitted to the sitemap. Is it necessary that the URL be submitted to the sitemap if it has already been indexed? Appreciate your help with this. Mark
Technical SEO | | marktheshark100 -
New SEO manager needs help! Currently only about 15% of our live sitemap (~4 million url e-commerce site) is actually indexed in Google. What are best practices sitemaps for big sites with a lot of changing content?
In Google Search console 4,218,017 URLs submitted 402,035 URLs indexed what is the best way to troubleshoot? What is best guidance for sitemap indexation of large sites with a lot of changing content? view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | Hamish_TM1 -
Changing URLs
As of right now we are using yahoo small business, when creating a product you have to declare an id, when we created the site we were not aware that you will not be able to change the id but also the ID is being used as the URL. we have a couple thousand products in which we will need to update the URLs. What would the best way to be to fix this without losing much juice from our current pages. Also I was thinking that if we did them all in a couple weeks it would hurt us a lot, and the best course of action would be to do a slow roll out of the URL changes. Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
Technical SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
Url folder structure
I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
Technical SEO | | Vacatia_SEO
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature _
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes.
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _ domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_ domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.0 -
Block url with dynamic text in
I've just ran a report and I have a lot of duplicate page titles, most of which seem to be the review page, I use Magento and my normal url would be something like blah-blahtext.html but the review url is something like blah-blahtext/reviews/category/categoryname So I want to block the /reviews url bit as no one ever leaves reviews and it's not something I will be using in the future. Also I have a dynamic navigation which creates urls that look like product-name.html?size=2&colour=14 these are also creating duplicate urls, anyway to fix this? While I'm asking, anyone any tips for Magento?
Technical SEO | | Beermonster0 -
How much of a hit to changing urls?
Hi, We have a few pages that from an SEO perspective have poor URLs. We are planning on changing them (and 301 redirecting) the old page to the new page. I heard in the past, this can temporarily negatively impact your SERP rank etc. Since the old URLs are bad, even if there is a temporary negative hit, changing them in the long run it is better, but curious if anyone has any experience on what to expect.
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
How can i redirect a url that has % in it?
Google webmaster tools shows a 400 eroor for an old link that contains a 30% off in it. The problem is the % I would like to 301 redirect this link : http://www.geographics.com/Graduation-Stationery,-35%-OFF-Printable-Certificates-Blank-Gift-Certificates/c1353_1354_1359/index.html to http://www.geographics.com/Graduation-Stationery-Printable-Certificates-Blank-Gift-Certificates/c1353_1354_1359/index.html We do not know how to do this in httaccess. Can you please advise? Thanks a lot! Madlena
Technical SEO | | Madlena0 -
Keywords in Vanity URL
If I set up a vanity URL that just 301's to the main site, do the search engines look at the keywords in the vanity URL when determing how to rank the site. For example, if I set up a vanity URL of www.coolnewtechgear.com, and redirect it to www.company.com/products/, would the search engines view the keywords of cool, new, tech, and gear and associate that with the page it's getting redirected to? Or does it ignore the vanity URL and only look at the content of the page itself?
Technical SEO | | ryanwats0