Is it worth changing our blog post URL's?
-
We're considering changing the URL's for our blog posts and dropping the date information.
Ex.
http://spreecommerce.com/blog/2012/07/27/spree-1-1-3-released/
changes to
http://spreecommerce.com/blog/spree-1-1-3-released/
Based on what I've learned here the new URL is better for SEO but since these pages already exist do we risk a minor loss of Google juice with 301 redirects? We have a sitemap for the blog posts so I imagine this wouldn't be too hard for Google to learn the new ones.
-
I did it to two client sites and neither lost any rankings. I used the Change Permalink Helper plugin, which made the redirects seamless. The most unfortunate thing about changing URL permalinks is the fact that if you have social sharing buttons on your posts, all the counts get reset to zero.
I must add that just because I didn't lose rankings doesn't mean there's not a chance, albeit a small one, that you will.
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
-
Soft 404's on a 301 Redirect...Why?
So we launched a site about a month ago. Our old site had an extensive library of health content that went away with the relaunch. We redirected this entire section of the site to the new education materials, but we've yet to see this reflected in the index or in GWT. In fact, we're getting close to 500 soft 404's in GWT. Our development team confirmed for me that the 301 redirect is configured correctly. Is it just a waiting game at this point or is there something I might be missing? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
My blog page isn't ranking in Google
Hi, I noticed that my blog page on my site isn't in Google when i search for full URL link http://www.asggutter.com/blog/ instead i see page that isn't even working asggutter.com/sitemap.xml screen shot http://screencast.com/t/6OVFLwL8nTL How i can i fix that. Thanks
Technical SEO | | tonyklu0 -
Case sensitive url's
Hi, Really appreciate advice on this one in advance! We had a problem with case sensitive urls (eg: /web-jobs or /Web-jobs) We added a code to convert all urls into lowercase letters and added 301 redirection. We are now experiencing problems with duplicate page content. Each time a url contains caps letter it is converted and redirected to small letter url. I can convert all urls into lowercase letters (all places) but the problem now is google have already indexed urls so they may cause duplicate content issue. The solution: Remove 301 redirection added to convert url into small letter. Add canonical url which converts url into complete small letter, so google index content only from canonical url. But I am little confused about what will happen to already indexed pages with caps in url. Appreciate any advice you can give? Simon
Technical SEO | | simmo2350 -
Rel = Canonical in Blog Posting
Hello, I keep coming back to rel=canonical issues! I noticed when I "view pagesource" that my drupal blog posting automatically creates link rel="canonical" href="/sample-blog-title" /< pattern (with the > reversed) in the source code. I'm getting a lot of Rel=Canonical warnings and double content warnings from Seomoz so I've been trying to insert link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/blog/my-awesome-blog-post"< but the page won't retain the code for some reason. I'm entering the code in Plain Text, but saving the document as Full HTML. Is there a better piece of code I can put in to demonstrate that the original blog page is the original source? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | OTSEO0 -
Ecommerce website: Product page setup & SKU's
I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience. This is where my head starts to hurt! Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size). My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this: a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page. b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right. Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page? I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. . Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well? Kind regards Tom
Technical SEO | | DHS_SH0 -
Getting Rid of Duplicate Page Titles After URL Structure Change
I've had all sorts of issues with google when they just dropped us on our head a few weeks ago. Google is crawling again after I made some changes, but they're still not ranking our content like they were so I have a few questions. I changed our url structure from /year/month/date/post-title to just /post-title and 301 redirected the old link structure to the new. When I look I see over 3000 duplicate title errors listing both versions of the url. 1. How do I get google to crawl the old url structure and recognize the 301 redirect and update the index? 2. Google is crawling the site again, but they're not ranking us like they were before. We're in a highly competitive category and I'm aware of that, but we've always been an authority in our niche. We have plenty of quality backlinks and often we're originators of the content which is then rewritten by a trillion websites everywhere. We're not the best at writing and titles, but we're working on it and this did not matter much to google previously as it was ranking us pretty highly on the front page and certainly ranking us over many sites that are ranking above us today. Some backlinks http://www.alexa.com/site/linksin/dajaz1.com A few examples - if you google twista gucci louis prada you'll see many of the sites who trackbacked to us since we premiered the song rank much higher than us. 3 weeks ago we were ranking above them. http://dajaz1.com/twista-gucci-louis-prada/ google search jadakiss consignment mixtape 3 weeks ago we were ranking higher than all 4 sites ranking above us. The sites ranking above us even link to us or mention us, yet they rank above us now. original content here http://dajaz1.com/watch-jadakiss-confirms-cosignment-mixtape-2012-schedule/ I could throw out a ton of examples like this. How do we get google to rank us again. It should be noted that I'm not using any SEO plugin's on the site. I hand coded what's in there, and I know I can probably do it better so any tips or ideas is welcome. I'm pretty sure that our issues were caused by the Yoast SEO Plugin as when I search site:dajaz1.com the pages and topics that display were all indexed while the plugin was active. I've since removed it and all calls to it in the database, but I'm pretty nervous about plugins right now. Which brings me to my third and final question How do I get rid of the page category and topic pages that were indexed and seem to be ranking higher than the rest of our content? I lied one more. For category url I've set it to remove the category base so the url is dajaz1.com/news or dajaz1.com/music is that preferable or is this causing me issues? Any feedback is appreciated. Also google is crawling again (see attached image) but the Kilobytes downloaded per day hasn't. Should I be concerned about this? Gd9i6
Technical SEO | | malady0 -
Once duplicate content found, worth changing page or forget it?
Hi, the SEOmoz crawler has found over 1000 duplicate pages on my site. The majority are based on location and unfortunately I didn't have time to add much location based info. My question is, if Google has already discovered these, determined they are duplicate, and chosen the main ones to show on the SERPS, is it worth me updating all of them with localalized information so Google accepts the changes and maybe considers them different pages? Or do you think they'll always be considered duplicates now?
Technical SEO | | SpecialCase0
