How to avoid seo loss after URL restructuring / change?
-
We are doing On Page SEO over haul of our website. Our old url used to be mydomain.com/send/FlowersInCity-1-CityName.html we are changing it to mydomain.com/send/Flowers-to-CityName
Firstly, will it be advisable to do so since we are in the top 10 in most of the Keywords (but losing ranking each month):
The website is very content rich site. Till beginning of 2012, we used be in the top three spots mostly due to On Page and Good content, thus getting the inbound links automatically. But now the things have change, industry has lot of competition and few players have already done heavy SEO for their website, both On and off page thus overtaking us in Ranking.
We are also doing other requisite On Page and Off Page work but I am struck with the URL decision part.
Secondly, and MOST IMPORTANTLY – if I should change the url, how to minimize the risk of losing the present SEO in this kind of URL restructuring case?
Thanks
Suman
-
I think there is something you can do with the old and new sitemap that helps too. It is on this forum somewhere.
-
Hi,
There is a golden rule related with urls: "never change those"
You need to have a very strong reason in order to touch urls that are ranking well.
But if you do decide to change them there is only one very important thing you need to do: 301 redirect old urls to new ones. It will solve most of the problems.
If you do lose rankings now - there are other things to change - that html at the end is irrelevant for the rankings.
So the bottom line is if you do decide to touch the urls, adding a permanent 301 redirect to the old urls that will point to the new ones is crucial.
My 2 c. Hope it helps.
If you post the urls another 2 cents will be added
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 Changes Twice in the Same Year
I've got a new client with a great site, great off-page optimization and some scars and a hangover from a bad developer relationship. I'd be so grateful for your thoughts on this situation: Some time in the not-too-distant-past, the website is established and new content is posted. We'll call this Alpha. In April 2015, the client migrates to WordPress, implementing 301 redirects on every content page because of the capitalization issues of the old CMS. That means Alpha URLs are redirecting to Betas. Problem is, the new Beta WordPress URLs are the the permalink structure: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ and update by default when the page content is updated meaning that any updates to existing content cause another 301. It's my belief that for evergreen content, dates in the URL do nothing to help you and might even hurt from a user-experience standpoint, if not a search engine one. So, naturally, I'd like to move to the simple/%postname%/ structure, which would be Gamma. So, here's how I think we should fix it. Step 1: Update the sitemap and navigation and make the desired URL (Gamma) structure the default and the canonical. Step 2: Change the Alpha -> Beta redirects to Alpha -> Gamma Step 3: Add Beta -> Gamma redirects Anyone done this in the past? Anyone have any problems with it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LindsayDayton0 -
Which is better /section/ or section/index.php?
I have noticed that Google has started to simply link to /section/ as opposed to /section/index.php and I haven't changed any canonical tags etc. I have looked at my pages moz authority for the two /section/ = 28/100
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TimHolmes
/section/index.php = 42/100 How would I go about transferring the authority to /section/ from /section/index.php to hopefully help me in my organic serp positions etc. Any insight would be great 🐵0 -
Website.com/blog/post vs website.com/post
I have clients with Wordpress sites and clients with just a Wordpress blog on the back of website. The clients with entire Wordpress sites seem to be ranking better. Do you think the URL structure could have anything to do with it? Does having that extra /blog folder decrease any SEO effectiveness? Setting up a few new blogs now...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PortlandGuy0 -
Why Google scrambles/change our product page titles? And descriptions too?
Here is an interesting issue we are noticing lately: Google is always more scrambling and changing the title of our product pages in the SERPs results. Here is an example: Keyword: "bach arioso sheet music". We are down at the 6th spot, and the shown title is different from what's defined inside the TITLE tag of that page. And that appears often for other keywords/product pages. Why's that? How can we control that? It is hard for us to optimize titles and test CTR and other metrics if Google is showing them differently to the users. Similar issue with the description tag: sometimes Google instead of showing to the users the description tag contents, shows part of the text taken from the page even though the searched keywords are included both in the title and the description tag, and so I can't find justification to show text taken from the page instead... it is quite difficult to understand the motivation beyond all this! Any thoughts are very welcome. Thanks! Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Change of language
Hi everyone, We bought a domain which had content in German for over 8 years. So the rankings it had were in another search engine aswell. So i've changed the language of the content + targetting in webmaster tools to Dutch. (i've created unique content, in case your wondering)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Online_Supply
Now we don't rank in the targetted search engine, nor in the search engine the website was previously ranked. My question is how can we fix this so we are going to get indexed and ranked for the targetted search engine. Thanks in advance.0 -
What SEO tactics are effective for optimising a site where content is changing very frequently (for example an online newspaper)?
I have always worked with sites where content has a reasonably long life-span but need to now consider SEO for a site where content is changing very rapidly. I have read that Google will re-spider your content more frequently if it finds that it is changing frequently but are there effective ways to let the search engines know as new articles are published? Also, if content is removed within only a day or two of being published, can this have a negative impact on SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Greenie0 -
Is there any negative SEO effect of having comma's in URL's?
Hello, I have a client who has a large ecommerce website. Some category names have been created with comma's in - which has meant that their software has automatically generated URL's with comma's in for every page that comes beneath the category in the site hierarchy. eg. 1 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/ eg. 2 : http://shop.deliaonline.com/store/music,-dvd-and-games/dvds-and-blu_rays/action-and-adventure/ etc... I know that URL's with comma's in look a bit ugly! But is there 'any' SEO reason why URL's with comma's in are any less effective? Kind Regs, RB
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichBestSEO0 -
Duplicate Content http://www.website.com and http://website.com
I'm getting duplicate content warnings for my site because the same pages are getting crawled twice? Once with http://www.website.com and once with http://website.com. I'm assuming this is a .htaccess problem so I'll post what mine looks like. I think installing WordPress in the root domain changed some of the settings I had before. My main site is primarily in HTML with a blog at http://www.website.com/blog/post-name BEGIN WordPress <ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine On
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thirdseo
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]</ifmodule> END WordPress0