Changing Subfolder that has been crawled before
-
Question:
I am using a wordpress multisite and I enabled the crawl options yesterday
www.abc.com/subfolder <-original
but i find that www.abc.com/sub is good enough
I checked the site:abc.com but I find that my pages in the /subfolder has been crawled before.
Can I just change it to www.abc.com/sub or it will raise duplicate content issue?
-
Thank you so much. I think it wasn't a big deal everything seems fine!
-
If you go to the research tools tab, there's a link to SEO Web Crawler. You can request a crawl of your site instead of waiting the week for Roger to normally come back to your site.
-
Updated Reply
I will study the plugin and wait for MOZ crawl and will get back to you.
Thanks Keri
The MOZ crawl shows yesterday's data. so it hasn't checked my updated URLs.
I am worried that all of my new /sub will be 404 by tomorrow.
-
It's useful to have the redirection plugin in general, I've found.
Can you tell me a little bit about the crawl error you're getting from the SEOmoz crawl?
-
Thank you so much Keri again for your super fast reply.!
are you suggeting that I need to do both?
the redirection plugin and sitemap update?
or sitemap update should be just fine?
I am studying the Redirection plugin right now I think it would be useful to redirect what SEOMOZ analytic bot thinks is an wrong URL to a proper URL?
P.S. I am asking this because
I have an horrific experience before. (it's a different case, not related to my previous questions) It's a bit different because I once moved one of my websites to a different domain and google just kept on crawling the previous domain name's data, and sending 404 and my new domain name got penalized. (I still can't get it shown on Google after a few months) so I thought it would happen the same to subfolders.
-
You'll probably be just fine. The XML sitemap plugin will also help tell Google where the new URLs are, and you'll have the redirection as well.
-
Thank you so much Keri for answering my questions.
The subfolder website is totally new. Google hasn't crawled it fully yet.
there is no backlink. no one knows the website exists except our team.
hmmm. so updating the sitemap won't do it all? sigh. I am a newbie so i just have to trust you guys..
I already changed the subfolder and will download the Redirection plugin in WP right now
-
You would want to use a 301 redirect (the Redirection plugin in WP is good for this) to tell Google that the old content moved to the new location. If you install it then do the changes, it may even do the necessary redirection for you automatically.
Am I correct in that you just set this up a day ago, so it's not like you're doing this three years in with a whole bunch of backlinks and needing to worry about link juice?
-
Thank you so much for answering this so quick
so i can just change it, and update the sitemap and i should have no problem right?
I was worried because I thought once google crawl my web, it remembers my previous /subfolder and add my /sub on top of it. and I thought my original /subfolder would be 404 and /sub would be duplicate content.
but I am so relieved now! I think i was just being paranoid.
-
Change it and make sure you update your sitemap so when it is crawled again, they will have it correctly.
if you don't already have a sitemap plug in use the google xlm sitemap plug in. Does a great job....
Cheers.....
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
-
Should I change our main category pages to product listing pages?
With the thought of improving user experience, as well as rankings in Google, I'm considering changing our main category pages to product listing pages (with sub-categories remaining, still). These main category pages are very standard and don't link to any informational content, such as buyers guides, etc. What's driven this is the latest Google core update. I've noticed our main competitor (who we were out-ranking before... but not now) now uses this approach. I can see the benefit from a user perspective, i.e. less clicks to reach products. What's the pros/cons from an SEO point of view, please? Could the potential duplication of content be an issue? For context, we have about 2,000 products and website is on Magento 2.
On-Page Optimization | | alifeofjoy1 -
Content with changing URL and duplicate content
Hi everyone, I have a question regarding content (user reviews), that are changing URL all the time. We get a lot of reviews from users that have been dining at our partner restaurants, which get posted on our site under (new) “reviews”. My worry however is that the URL for these reviews is changing all the time. The reason for this is that they start on page 1, and then get pushed down to page 2, and so on when new reviews come in. http://www.r2n.dk/restaurant-anmeldelser I’m guessing that this could cause for serious indexing problems? I can see in google that some reviews are indexed multiple times with different URLs, and some are not indexed at all. We further more have the specific reviews under each restaurant profile. I’m not sure if this could be considered duplicate content? Maybe we should tell google not to index the “new reviews section” by using robots.txt. We don’t get much traffic on these URLs anyways, and all reviews are still under each restaurant-profile. Or maybe the canonical tag can be used? I look forward to your input. Cheers, Christian
On-Page Optimization | | Christian_T2 -
The value of changing URL structure
Dear Moz members, There have been many questions on this forum on this topic but I cannot find one that completely answers my question. We launched our new website about 7 months ago and the website contains around 3.000 product pages. The average page authority of the product pages is quite still quite low (12). The URL structure is built like this: www.website.com/catalog/ID/productname/ (with right keywords in the product name). So e.g the current URL is Our competitors rank higher on certain keywords while page authority (and DA) are significantly lower. Their URL structure is set up like this: www.website.com/productname/. Our most import keyword is "grafmonumenten" and the link we would like to rank on is: https://www.denhollandsche.nl/grafmonumenten/ My question now is:
On-Page Optimization | | stepsstones
1: how important is the length/depth of the URL structure?
2: is it beneficial for us to change the structure (www.website.com/productname/) use permanent redirects? My expierence is that changing the 'page url' can cause a short term drop in the serps, but can have positive effects on the longer term. Thanks for helping me out!0 -
Changing the url of a page
Hello. I would like to change the url of a page. It currently has very few inbound links. I would set up a 301 redirect to the new url. Is there anything else I should take into account before changing the url? Is there a downside to changing a url? Do inbound links carry the same value when a 301 redirect is involved? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Would Changing the Titles of Root Categories Be Bad?
I have researched some more effective keywords to change my root category titles to. I am wondering if it would be a bad idea to change these titles considering all the things that could go wrong. From what i'm gathering there are a LOT of things that can go wrong but at the same time these things do need to be changed sometime! Is this a good or a bad idea & why? What could go wrong? Should I try changing the category titles one at a time instead of risking every one of my keywords / category titles not working out in the serps right away?
On-Page Optimization | | Mike.Bean0 -
Weighing costs & benefits for domain name change.
I've got a site that is under consideration for a domain change, however I have plenty of concerns about our particular situation. I'd love to explain my scenario and then get some feedback! The domain in question is beverlys.com and has been up and running since 1996 (almost 16 years), so it has advantages in that it's a long standing trusted domain. For the majority of that time however, the site was mostly a simple static informational site to accommodate a brick and mortar business. Then starting in 2009 the site underwent the change to become an e-commerce site. Since then we have been working to compete with other sites in the same industry and attempting to rank well in organic results. In particular our business sells fabric, so "fabric" is one keyword we measure in various way to get an idea where we stand with the competition. Over time we have had ups and downs while ranking for "fabric", specifically. At our peak we ranked 16th in Google in September 2011, and 18th as recent as January 2012. However since that time we have fallen off the map in Google's results. Currently we are around the 100th result! Though in Yahoo! and Bing we continue to show strongly with organic rankings hovering between 15-20. I can only theorize that something in the last few rounds of Google's algorithm updates has punished us and thus far have not been able to identity the issue or find any resolution. So, in response, one of the options on the table is to use a new domain name that specifically incorporates the keyword that is important to us. Unfortunately our current domain does not use "fabric" so we would use something like beverly-fabrics.com or what-have you. There is so much potential for disaster in switching domain names that I'm having a hard time considering this as a viable option. But at this point I don't want to close any doors. We want to have the best chance at long term success and if a domain name change would help in that we would do it. I'd love to hear anyone's opinions, recommendations or advice about our situation!
On-Page Optimization | | dickslee230 -
Why has only one page been crawled?
I went over the list of possible reasons, but I don't think any of them apply to the site in question: sarahhueniken.com. Any other reasons only one page would be crawled?
On-Page Optimization | | scottsemple0 -
Main Page title change.
Hi, For some reason every week or two I am changing the title tag of my main page. Each change takes place because I find new version better than the old one. Does this have any impact on my SEO results (I'm keeping the main keywords each time) ? If it has an impact is it positive or negative ? And should I stick to one title and not change it under any circumstances for long periods of time ? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | lolskizz0