Will our PA be retained after URL updates?
-
Our web hosting company recently applied a seo update to our site to deal with canonicalization issues and also rewrote all urls to lower case. As a result our PA is now 1 on all pages its effected. I took this up with them and they had this to say.
"I must confess I’m still a bit lost however can assure you our consolidation tech uses a 301 permanent redirect for transfers. This should ensure any back link equity isn’t lost.
For instance this address: http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-bath-sheets/aztex/egyptian-cotton-Bath-sheet_ct474bd182pd2731.htm
Redirects to this page: http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/towels-bath-sheets/aztex/egyptian-cotton-bath-sheet_ct474bd182pd2731.htm
And the redirect returns 301 header response – as discussed in your attached forum thread extract"
Firstly, is canonicalization working as the number of duplicate pages shot up last week and also will we get our PA back?
Thanks
Craig
-
Hi Greg,
Thanks for your reply. So in a nutshell we just need to get back links updated use the new URL's in order to pull back PA we had previously?
Regards
Craig
-
Sorting out the canonicalisation was a good move, and generally url's with lower case characters are the best practices, but there is no negative SEO involved with letters in Caps in the URL. (lets hope the PA wasn't to high, as the new URL's are essentially new pages)
The link juice will flow via the redirect, but i dont think Open Site Explorer will follow the redirect as a link that contrbutes to PA.
Perhaps ask your SEO to change the URL's on links that have been built to these pages. This will definitely bring your PA for these pages back up. '
Greg
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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
-
Google Only Indexing Canonical Root URL Instead of Specified URL Parameters
We just launched a website about 1 month ago and noticed that Google was indexing, but not displaying, URLs with "?location=" parameters such as: http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/?location=great-falls-virginia and http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/?location=mclean-virginia. Instead, Google has only been displaying our root URL http://www.castlemap.com/local-house-values/ in its search results -- which we don't want as the URLs with specific locations are more important and each has its own unique list of houses for sale. We have Yoast setup with all of these ?location values added in our sitemap that has successfully been submitted to Google's Sitemaps: http://www.castlemap.com/buy-location-sitemap.xml I also tried going into the old Google Search Console and setting the "location" URL Parameter to Crawl Every URL with the Specifies Effect enabled... and I even see the two URLs I mentioned above in Google's list of Parameter Samples... but the pages are still not being added to Google. Even after Requesting Indexing again after making all of these changes a few days ago, these URLs are still displaying as Allowing Indexing, but Not On Google in the Search Console and not showing up on Google when I manually search for the entire URL. Why are these pages not showing up on Google and how can we get them to display? Only solution I can think of would be to set our main /local-house-values/ page to noindex in order to have Google favor all of our other URL parameter versions... but I'm guessing that's probably not a good solution for multiple reasons.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Nitruc0 -
Best SEO url woocommerce, what to do?
Hi! Today we have our product categories indexed (by misstake) and for one of our desired keywords, a category have the nr 1 rank. By misstake, we didnt set nofollow, noindex on our categories, just tags, archives etc. We are now migrating to from Ithemes Exchange to Woocommerce and ime looking on improving our SEO urls for the categories. For keyword "Key1" we rank with this url: http://site/product-category/Key1. The seo meta title and description where untouched when we launched the site last spring so it doesnt look so good.. The plan is to stripe out product-category and instead ad some description ( i have a newly written text of 95 words, 519 letters without space with they keyword precent 5 times in a natural way ) to that particular category and have the url as following: http://site/key1 and then have a 301 redirect for the old http://site/product-category/Key1. What do you think of this? What shall i consider? on the right track? Grateful for any help! // Jonas
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | knubbz0 -
Location in URLs question
Hi there, my company is a national theater news publisher. Quick question about a particular use case. When an editor publishes a story they can assign several discrete locations, allowing it to appear on each of those locations within our website. This article (http://www.theatermania.com/denver-theater/news/full-casting-if-then-tour-idina-menzel_74354.html), for example, appears in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Denver section. We force the author to choose a primary location from that list, which controls the location displayed in the URL. Is this a bad practice? I'm wondering if the fact that having 'Denver' in the URL is misleading and hurts SEO value, particularly since that article features several other cities.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Website Re-Launch - New URLS / Old URL WMT
Hello... We recently re-launched website with a new CMS (Magento). We kept the same domain name, however most of the structure changed. We were diligent about inputting the 301 redirects. The domain is over 15 years old and has tons of link equity and history. Today marks 27 days since launch...And Google Webmaster Tools showed me a recently detected (dated two days ago) URL from the old structure. Our natural search traffic has take a slow dive since launch...Any thoughts? Some background info: The old site did not have a sitemap.xml. The relaunched site does. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0 -
Should we use URL parameters or plain URL's=
Hi, Me and the development team are having a heated discussion about one of the more important thing in life, i.e. URL structures on our site. Let's say we are creating a AirBNB clone, and we want to be found when people search for apartments new york. As we have both have houses and apartments in all cities in the U.S it would make sense for our url to at least include these, so clone.com/Appartments/New-York but the user are also able to filter on price and size. This isn't really relevant for google, and we all agree on clone.com/Apartments/New-York should be canonical for all apartment/New York searches. But how should the url look like for people having a price for max 300$ and 100 sqft? clone.com/Apartments/New-York?price=30&size=100 or (We are using Node.js so no problem) clone.com/Apartments/New-York/Price/30/Size/100 The developers hate url parameters with a vengeance, and think the last version is the preferable one and most user readable, and says that as long we use canonical on everything to clone.com/Apartments/New-York it won't matter for god old google. I think the url parameters are the way to go for two reasons. One is that google might by themselves figure out that the price parameter doesn't matter (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1235687?hl=en) and also it is possible in webmaster tools to actually tell google that you shouldn't worry about a parameter. We have agreed to disagree on this point, and let the wisdom of Moz decide what we ought to do. What do you all think?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peekabo0 -
Expired urls
For a large jobs site, what would be the best way to handle job adverts that are no longer available? Ideas that I have include: Keep the url live with the original content and display current similar job vacancies below - this has the advantage of continually growing the number of indexed pages. 301 redirect old pages to parent categories - this has the advantage of concentrating any acquired link juice where it is most needed. Your thoughts much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cottamg0 -
If I had an issue with a friendly URL module and I lost all my rankings. Will they return now that issue is resolved next time I'm crawled by google?
I have 'magic seo urls' installed on my zencart site. Except for some reason no one can explain why or how the files were disabled. So my static links went back to dynamic (index.php?**********) etc. The issue was resolved with the module except in that time google must have crawled my site and I lost all my rankings. I'm nowher to be found in the top 50. Did this really cause such an extravagant SEO issue as my web developers told me? Can I expect my rankings to return next time my site is crawled by google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Pete790 -
Link building idea - Will it work?
The SEO agency I am working for are currently trying out a unique link building tactic that i was hoping for some feedback about. Basically, we have launched a Free SEO package, and have posted it across various established social media profiles. So far we have had about 20 sign up. We gain access to their site and provide them with 4 keywords that we will be working on, we do the necessary on page optimization to get them ranking. We will then perform some very basic link building tactics on their site. In exchange for our services, we will get the following: Firstly, we will place a link on their home page linking to our own site. Secondly, we will personally write content related to their site, create a new page within their site that will contain this article. We will then have a link from this article leading to one of our own client's sites. (paying customers) What do you guys think? The Free SEO client sites have minimum PR's of 2, and we are hoping to build a database of these free clients that will be responsible for boosting the ranking of our paying customers. Is there anything that could be improved with this technique?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danielblinman0