Will adding /blog/ to my urls affect SEO rankings?
-
Following advice from an external SEO agency I removed /blog/ from our permalinks late last year. The logic was that it a) doesn't help SEO and b) reduces the character count for the slug.
Both points make sense. However, it makes segmenting blog posts from other content in Google Analytics impossible.
If I were to add /blog/ back into my URLs, and redirected the permalinks, would it harm my rankings?
Thanks!
-
I had recently remove a blog from my website and the website certainly drops in ranking. The reason is that Google considers it a totally new page.
-
I agree with you both that "blog" in the urls is valuable in terms of segmenting Analytics data. The only thing I'd bear in mind is that changing the URL isn't actually just changing the URL. To Google - you are deleting one page and creating another, and it takes time to understand that the new page should replace the old page, even if there's a redirect in place.
Given that you've presumably already done this once and you're reversing it, the risk should be lower, but I'd still approach this change as though it's a migration. I'm not saying "don't do it" just "take precautions".
In terms of tracking in the interim - you could consider using a custom dimension to identify blog posts. Use Google Tag Manager to determine the page is a blog post then send the dimension along with the page hit. Not ideal but it's something if you find you don't have other options.
Good luck!
-
Hi there,
I would keep a "blog" in the URL since it can get really messy in Google Analytics.
Ross
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
-
A new client has image urls showing above their page rankings for the same key phrase.
New client website https://yorkshirefoodguide.co.uk/ has for some key phrase searches the URL for an image showing above or as well as the url for the landing page. I'd be happy for it to show in the image pack but I want to url to rank in the main serp. The site is in WordPress and I'm sure this is just a setting I need to manage. Can you help please?
Technical SEO | | Marketing_Optimist0 -
Best practice for URL - Language/country
Hi, We are planning on having our website localized into more languages. We already have an English and German version. The German version is currently a sub-domain: www.example.com --> English version de.example.com --> German version Is this recommended? Or is it always better to have URLs with language prefixes such a: www.example.com/de www.example.com/es Which is a better practice in terms of SEO?
Technical SEO | | Kilgray1 -
URL Change, Old URLs Still In Index
Recently changed URLs on a website to remove dynamic parameters. We 301'd the old dynamic links (canonical version) to the cleaner parameter-free URLs. We then updated the canonical tags to reflect these changes. All pages dropped at least a few ranking positions and now Moz shows both the new page ranking slightly lower in results pages and the old page still in the index. I feel like I'm splitting value between the two page versions until the old one disappears... is there a way to consolidate this quickly?
Technical SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Will using tabs on my page for navigation hurt SEO
Currently we have tabs on some pages that are set so that the page shows all the content for search engines on one page, but the user sees only part of the content until they click a tab. We are unable to use title tags for the tabbed areas. We think this hurts us from an SEO standpoint. We are getting only 3 keyword where we could have 12 if they were individual pages. What is the thought on using tabs and is it okay? Has there been any case studies on this?
Technical SEO | | cayseo0 -
Will rel canonical tags remove previously indexed URLs?
Hello, 7 days ago, we implemented canonical tags to resolve duplicate content issues that had been caused by URL parameters. These "duplicate content" had already been indexed. Now that the URLs have rel canonical tags in place, will Google automatically remove from its index the other URLs with the URL parameters? I ask because we have been tracking the approximate number of URLs indexed by doing a site: search in Google, and we have barely noticed a decrease in URLs indexed. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | yacpro130 -
Fixing a wordpress 404 error for /feed and /comments/feed?
I have a wordpress site that does not have a blog currently. I'm getting a 404 for /feed and /comments/feed. Anyone know how I can fix?
Technical SEO | | DM50 -
Block /tag/ or not?
I've asked this question in another area but now i want to ask it as a bigger question. Do we block /tag/ with robots.txt or not. Here's why I ask: My wordpress site does not block /tag/ and I have many /tag/ results in the top 10 results of Google. Have for months. The question is, does Google see /tag/ on WordPress as duplicate content? SEOMoz says it's duplicate content but it's a tag. It's not really content per say. I'm all for optimizing my site but Google is not penalizing me for /tag/ results. I don't want to block /tag/ if Google is not seeing it as duplicate content for only one reason and that's because I have many results in the top 10 on G. So, can someone who knows more about this weigh in on the subject for I really would like a accurate answer. Thanks in advance...
Technical SEO | | MyAllenMedia0 -
Can JavaScrip affect Google's index/ranking?
We have changed our website template about a month ago and since then we experienced a huge drop in rankings, especially with our home page. We kept the same url structure on entire website, pretty much the same content and the same on-page seo. We kind of knew we will have a rank drop but not that huge. We used to rank with the homepage on the top of the second page, and now we lost about 20-25 positions. What we changed is that we made a new homepage structure, more user-friendly and with much more organized information, we also have a slider presenting our main services. 80% of our content on the homepage is included inside the slideshow and 3 tabs, but all these elements are JavaScript. The content is unique and is seo optimized but when I am disabling the JavaScript, it becomes completely unavailable. Could this be the reason for the huge rank drop? I used the Webmaster Tolls' Fetch as Googlebot tool and it looks like Google reads perfectly what's inside the JavaScrip slideshow so I did not worried until now when I found this on SEOMoz: "Try to avoid ... using javascript ... since the search engines will ... not indexed them ... " One more weird thing is that although we have no duplicate content and the entire website has been cached, for a few pages (including the homepage), the picture snipet is from the old website. All main urls are the same, we removed some old ones that we don't need anymore, so we kept all the inbound links. The 301 redirects are properly set. But still, we have a huge rank drop. Also, (not sure if this important or not), the robots.txt file is disallowing some folders like: images, modules, templates... (Joomla components). We still have some html errors and warnings but way less than we had with the old website. Any advice would be much appreciated, thank you!
Technical SEO | | echo10