Can your site be penalized for changing the url structure and if so how long till you get back?
-
I'm doing well on yahoo and bing and the only reason I can think of for why I'm not showing on Google is because I changed the url structure a couple of months ago. I have solid on and off page done for this site.
-
Hello deciph22 Also check that you have no links that still point to the old structure urls Ad check that you only refer to your home page in one way - don't refer to it as / and also as index.html or any other default page. I see a lot of sites that do it and it will hurt your ranking
-
Hi Lh66, First of all I want to make sure to you that if you had changed the url structure for your website then somehow it will affects your website ranking. In general If someone wants to change the url structure then it will have to perform 301 redirect because If someone has changed the old url then it will have to redirect to the new url to know the users that old page has been chnaged to the new page(url).
For this you had to know that which is the best strategy for picking up the url.
From the above link it is clear that how to change the url structure for a particular website.After changing the url structure you should know the exact reasons that why change in url affects seo.
i hope that your query had been solved.
-
If you have already redirected your links with 301 redirect it will pass on 90-99% of link juice.
So you would only see a small change in your rankings. If it's a new site with few links then there shouldn't be any change.
-
If you already did 301s, then build links to those pages. Check your GWT and see if they are counting it as a 404. Also submit a sitemap in GWT ASAP.
-
It was a brand new site so there wasn't many new links and I did create redirects to them
-
When you changed the url structure did you also do a redirect?
Did you have many links going to those older urls?
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
-
Changing URL to a subdomain?
Hi there, I had a website www.footballshirtcollective.com that has been live since July. It contains both content and eCommerce. I am now separating out the content so that; 1. The master domain is www.footballshirtcollective.com (content) pointing to a new site 2. Subdomain is store.footballshirtcollective.com (ecommerce) - pointing to the existing site. What do you advise I can do to minimise the impact on my search? Many thanks Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mjmaxwell0 -
How stupid is it to launch a new URL structure when our traffic is climbing?
We decided to redesign our site to make it responsive as Google is ranking sites based on mobile friendliness. Along with this we have changed our URL structure, meta tags, page content, site navigation, internal interlinking. How stupid is it to launch this site right in the middle of record traffic? Our traffic is climbing 10,000 more visitors every day with the current site. Visitors have increased 34% over the last 30 days compared to the previous 30 days.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Large Site - Complete Site URL Change and How to Preserver Organic Rankings/Traffic
Hello Community, What is your experience with site redesign when it comes to preserving the traffic? If a large enterprise website has to go through a site-wide enhancement (resulting in change of all URLs and partial content), what do you expect from Organic rankings and traffic? I assume we will experience a period that Google needs to "re-orientate" itself with the new site, if so, do you have similar experience and tips on how to minimize the traffic loss? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | b.digi0 -
If I only Link to Page via Sitemap, can it still get indexed?
Hi there! I am creating a ton of content for specific geographies. Is it possible for these pages to get indexed if I only put them in my sitemap and don't link to them through my actual site (though the pages will be live). Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
Travis0 -
Changing the spellings of titles and URl changes
Hi, Changing the spellings of titles and URl changes We identifies 500+ titles with some issues like spellings and punctuations and short or too long. We want to change them, but the titles are connected with the URL's when we change the titles the URl's change as well. My questions are 1. Is it a good way to change them all in one shot or do few daily 2. As the URl's change will Google index drop the old pages as they would be 404 and index new ones? 3. Will we have chances to have drop in traffic due to this? 4. Any way to redirect? as we have a Drupal website Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Can you Canonical to a URL in a different folder under the same domain?
I want to know if it's possible to add a canonical tag to a URL that points to a URL under a different folder. Content is just about the same. Here's an example (fake urls and product, but structure and parameters are similar to my client's website): domain.com/toy-ducks-results.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis domain.com/toy-ducks-details.aspx?color=Purple&model=Elvis&style=Sparkly Let's say that my purple Elvis ducks are really popular. Is there any harm in putting a rel=canonical on the Sparkly Elvis ducks page to the purple Elvis ducks page? Even though they are two different folders? /toy-ducks-results and /toy-ducks-details So, in effect, the preferred folder is /toy-ducks-results Thanks in advance for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EEE30 -
Can Dramatically Increasing Site Size Have Negative Effects?
I have a site with about 1000 pages. I'm planning to add about 30,000 pages to it. Can increasing the footprint by such an amount all of a sudden have any negative consequences for existing organic or hoped-for benefits from new pages? Would the site draw any increased scrutiny from Google for doing this? Any other considerations? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
How to link back to our main site from landing pages without getting penalized
I work for a small family insurance agency in CA and I am trying to learn how to compete in this extremely competitive industry. One of the ideas we had was to purchase all the long-tail keyword urls we could and use them as landing pages to direct traffic back to our primary site. (ex. autoinsurancecity.com). Our thought was that we could put landing pages on each that looked almost identical to the main page and use the navigation in the landing pages as links to direct traffic to the applicable category pages on the main site. (Ex. autoinsurancecity.com -> mainpage.com/auto-insurance). My concern is that I want to make sure we don't tick off Google. Implementing this strategy would result in each of the category pages getting lots of links from the landing page navigation very quickly. I don't think the links will be worth much from an SEO perspective, but I don't want them to look like spam either. Any suggestions on if this sort of tactic would put us at risk of being penalized? If so, does anyone have any suggestions on a better way to implement a strategy like this? Thank you in advance for the help! I'm totally new to this and any advice goes a long way!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | matthewbyers0