Changing the permalink estructure, worth the risk in 2017 ?
-
Hello, I have a wordpress blog that have more than 10 years old, when I created the blog the permalink had the date included.
Example: site.com/2007/02/02/my-post/
Do you guys think is it worth the risk of changing my url escructure to remove the date ? Ofcourse I would do the 301 redirects and such...
What I want to know if this will have any significant SEO advantage considering Google evolved so much ?
Thank you very much for reading my question
-
Hi,
I wouldn't recommend doing this, it's going to be a lot of work and you probably won't see any benefit. The historical value of those URLs is much stronger than any boost you'd get by taking out a few date folders. It's very common for blogs to have this URL structure, search engines are well aware of this structure and aren't going to ding you for having long or deep folder URLs.
Additionally, since your blog is 10 years old, you've probably got tons of posts, which means tons of 301 redirects. You have to take Google with a grain of salt when they come out and say things like "301s pass all authority now", it doesn't mean you should go out and redirect every page on your site. At some point you're going to begin affecting page speed, particularly on mobile devices.
-
Hey there,
Personally, I'm not a fan of date subfolders, especially if they're split into three. It creates an abnormally deep URL structure that doesn't seem overly logical.
Google have stated that using 301 redirects no longer loses link equity (Check out the link below!) so you wouldn't be at risk of losing any link juice if you did go this way.
https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
In terms of SEO advantage, I would say that putting your articles into 'themed' folders (think /blog/shoes as an example) would help as it would assist search engines in understanding your content, whilst including important keywords within the URL. Gianluca refers to these types of content pods as 'Topical Hubs' and his video is quite entertaining!:
https://mza.bundledseo.com/blog/topical-hubs-whiteboard-friday
Hope this helps,
Sean
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
-
Content change and variations in ranking
Hello, I have create a new webpage and asked google in the webmaster tool to crawl it. Within minutes it is ranked at a certain spot. I did make changes to it to increase the ranking and right away I could see variations in ranking either up or down ? I have done the same same thing for a page that has been existing on my website for many years. I changed the content, asked the webmaster tool to re-crawl it. It got the new content within minutes but the ranking doesn't seem to change. Maybe my content isn't good enough but I doubt. Could it be that on old pages it takes a couple weeks to see ranking changes whereas on new page it is instantaneous. Has anyone experienced something similar ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
Change domain.com to www.domain.com - influence on linkbuilding, seo, etc.
Hello, Do you know what can happen when i change domain.com to www.domain.com? Will it have an influence to my link-building portfolio (external links to domain.com), position on google search, etc. Thank you for help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Reyzer0 -
Is a rebranding that calls for a domain change a good time to sneak in a change to HTTPS?
Assumed: The material around good migration/redesign practices recommend, logically enough, to change as few things as possible in any given step, thus giving search engines as little trouble as possible identifying and reindexing changes. So if someone is doing significant changes to content, including uri changes, and a rebranding that requires a domain migration, they are generally better off doing one, than the other. 1) Beyond immediate testing and checking for correct crawl health being reestablished after one change, any thoughts on rules of thumb for when to do the second change? Do you do it as soon as you see your rankings/traffic turn the corner and confirm an upward trend after the drop, or wait till you have it all back (or at least hit a plateau)? In the absence of data or best practice I'm thinking of just letting 1/3rd to 2/3rds come back. Is a change to HTTPS small enough/similar enough from the search engine's perspective that it makes more sense to do that at the same time as the rebrand driven domain change? Does this create any special risks or considerations beyond those that arise from the individual components of the change?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JFA0 -
Changing domain for a magento store
Hi all, wondering if i could gather some views on the best approach for this please... We currently have a magento site up with about 150,000 pages (although only 9k indexed in Google as product pages are set to no index by default until the default manufacturer description has been rewritten). The indexed pages are mainly category pages, filtering options and a few search results. While none of the internal pages have massive DA - seem to average about 18-24 which isn't too bad for internal pages, I guess - I would like to transfer as much of this over to the new domain. My question is, is it really feasible to have an htaccess with about 10,000 301 redirects on the current domain? The server is pretty powerful so could probably serve the file without issue but would Google be happy with that? Would it be better to use the change url option in WMT instead. Ive never used that so not sure how that would work in this cause. Would it redirect users too? As a footnote, the site is changing because of branding reasons and not because of a penalty of the site. Thanks, Carl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daedriccarl0 -
Changing domains - best process to use?
I am about to move my Thailand-focused travel website into a new, broader Asia-focused travel website. The Thailand site has had a sad history with Google (algorithmic, not penalties) so I don't want that history to carry over into the new site. At the same time though, I want to capture the traffic that Google is sending me right now and I would like my search positions on Bing and Yahoo to carry through if possible. Is there a way to make all that happen? At the moment I have migrated all the posts over to the new domain but I have it blocked to search engines. I am about to start redirecting post for post using meta-refresh redirects with a no-follow for safety. But at the point where I open the new site up to indexing, should I at the same time block the old site from being indexed to prevent duplicate content penalties? Also, is there a method I can use to selectively 301 redirect posts only if the referrer is Bing or Yahoo, but not Google, before the meta-refresh fires? Or alternatively, a way to meta-refresh redirect if the referrer is Google but 301 redirect otherwise? Or is there a way to "noindex, nofollow" the redirect only if the referrer is Google? Is there a danger of being penalised for doing any of these things? Late Edit: It occurs to me that if my penalties are algorithmic (e.g. due to bad backlinks), does 301 redirection even carry that issue through to the new website? Or is it left behind on the old site?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gavin.Atkinson0 -
Changing Structure of Links... Yay or Nay?
Hello there,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NikitaG
My site: MigrationLawyers.co.za was made with no sub structure.
It has no categories, and no child pages, all the pages are simply added to the end of the URL.
Sometimes this results in a rather lengthy URL like:
**/Immigration-Permanent-Residence-Work-Permit-South-**Africa
I was hoping to arrange the pages a bit into a logical, parented structure that looks more like:
**/Immigration/Permanent-Residence/Work-Permit-South-**Africa I would have parented pages, making up the same pretty much URL Now the Questions:
Is it worth it?
Will google read my parented URL with all the keywords, or only the page's keywords?
What should I expect to see from google?
Will my SERPs be all messed up? I will, without doubt, 301 redirect all the old URLs to the new parented ones. Any advice would be great,
Thanks,
Nikita0 -
Dynamically change anchor text and URLs remotely
Hey i'm looking to create a widget in javascript which i dynamically change the urls and anchor text which link the widget back to my site remotely (via php) once it spreads. I have heard peopled doing this before, but i can't seem to find a example. Does anyone know of any examples/widgets or anything which can do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monster990 -
Changing website providers
After increasing suffering down time from my current website provider, I am seriously considering finding a new one. My only concern is the effect on SERP. Does anyone have any experience with this and what to do and avoid?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340