Preserving Social Shares Through URL Changes
-
We are making significant URL changes to our website. Because the URL is changing the social sharing buttons are not showing previous shared counts. I have read several resources like the one below that is linked to in several other similar questions.
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration
However I would love to get some insight from someone who has done this and there thoughts on the outcome. As an ecommerce site the "Social Proof" of products that have received social shares is a big deal to us.
In Mike Kings example above the counts are being attributed to the OLD URL which is problematic over time. Our site has been up for over 12 years and has had several major changes to it, and I am certain there will be more in the future, being able to preserve the count on the current URL is ideal. While I agree with him that over time I believe social platforms will let data pass through 301 redirects, until then I need to find the best way to do this. Also with his example and others I have seen people mention than new likes from the new url can reset the counter. If you have gone through this and have ideas pleas share them. I look forward to your thoughts thanks.
-
I think that's a great idea actually.
-
Mike,
Thanks a ton for jumping in, I really appreciate it! I may have a hybrid solution using part of your suggestion.
We have toyed with the idea of creating a custom URL for each product (easy to automate on our end) that is tied to the product number. That way if the URL changes in the future (if we did an architecture redesign which will happen again I am sure) the share count will still be connected to the unique url so it will last over time. The URL that is shared just redirects to the product page just like if I was using a URL shortner. In testing we are having issues with Twitter being able to recognize this and increase the shared count number on the product page, even though shared count is recognizing it. So if we amended our code to call from the shared count API to pull the old numbers until passed by the new numbers like you suggested I believe it would give a very accurate result. Also moving forward url changes down the line would not affect the numbers because they are unique to the product number.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you see any pitfalls?
-
Hey Jared,
As you might imagine I have done this. In fact we did it with the iAcquire.com redesign when I was still there. Basically we built something custom to grab the social counts and display them in our custom social share buttons. Our Creative Director wanted to make custom share buttons because they are otherwise different sizes and it looks silly. Then we just set the old URL in one place in the CMS and it pinged SharedCount.com's API to get all the different share counts and display them.
A quick update to my post, from what I understand, social shares are hopping 301s for Google +1s only right now.
As far as your issue with the new shares being attributed to old URLs, that's something I've thought about as well. You could potentially build a similar solution that we had, but allow the new social shares to go with the new URL and check the number of social shares between the new and old URL whenever the page loads. Once the new URL surpasses the old one's share count just skip grabbing the old URL's share counts altogether and use the new URL for both displaying share counts and capturing new shares.
Let me know if that helps. I'm sure we can perfect a solution for you, but it will involve getting a little creative.
-Mike
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
-
Clean URL vs. Parameter URL and Using Canonical URL...That's a Mouthfull!
Hi Everyone, I a currently migrating a Magento site over to Shopify Plus and have a question about best practices for using the canonical URL. There is a competitor that I believe is not doing it the correct way, so I want to make sure my way is the better choice. With 'Vendor Pages' in Shopify, they show up looking like: https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/vendors?q=Cellucor. Not as clean. Problem is that Shopify also creates https://www.campusprotein.com/collections/cellucor. Same products, same page, just a different more clean URL. I am seeing both indexed in Google. What I want to do is basically create a canonical URL from the URL with the parameter that points to the clean URL. The two pages are very similar. The only difference is that the clean URL page has some additional content at the top of the page. I would say the two pages are 90% the same. Do you see any issue with that?
Technical SEO | | vetofunk0 -
Should I change or redirect this URL?
Happy Friday everyone! I just noticed that one of our Attorney Profile's url's is wrong. We used to have someone named "Dana Fortugno" as our Family Law attorney, but when he left, (over two years ago) we hired "Scott Finelli." The person who setup the site, just changed the information on the page not url. So instead of it saying "http://www.kempruge.com/scott-finelli-jd-llm/;" it says "http://www.kempruge.com/dana-fortugno-jd-llm/." I'm considering taking all the content on the page with the wrong url, copying it to a new page with the correct URL and 301 redirecting (what would now be a blank page) to the new page with the correct URL. Is this the best way to handle this? Also, I don't believe there are many SEO concerns regarding the pages specifically. The profile pages aren't what we rank for in any of our Family Law related keywords. I am worried about having a completely blank page that just 301 redirects as looking bad to google, but not sure if it would? As always, thank you for your time and any assistance you can provide. Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
When to use canonical urls
I will be the first to admit I am never really 100% sure when to use canonical urls. I have a quick question and I am not really sure if this is a situation for a canonical or not. I am looking at a my friends building website and there are issues with what pages are ranking. Basically there homepage is focusing on the building refurbishment location but for some reason in internal page is ranking for that keyword and it is not mentioned at all on that page. Would this be a time to add the homepage url and a canonical on the ranking page (using yoast plugin) to tell Google that the homepage is the preferred page? Thanks Paul
Technical SEO | | propertyhunter0 -
Would these be considered dynamic URLs?
Hi, I have a (brand) new client (outdoor recreation), and it links to many different lodges. It's built in Wordpress (Pagelines), and the partner page link URLs. Although they do have the "?" in there, it's only has a single parameter. http://www.clientsite/?partners=partner-name Google is indexing the URLs, I do plan to increase the amount of content/on-page for each. Yet, weighing the risk/reward of rewriting all of these URLs.
Technical SEO | | csmithal0 -
Multiple URLs
I'm trying to check the URLs of this site- http://www.ofo.com.au, and I see that their old site has 301 re-directed to it...but the site http://ofo.com.au and http://outdoorfurnitureoutlet.com.au are both still up and I can't see any 301 redirects from them. Is it a problem even if when I do a site: search for them I get no results?
Technical SEO | | UnaRealidad0 -
Changing the URL structure will it help me or hurt me?
I got handed a website running on Joomla without the SEO friendly URL check box selected so our URLs all look like this www.rotaryvalve.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=22&Itemid=37 . I am hoping to rework this website in the near future here and plan on changing the URL structure across the website so there are some actual keywords in the URL. When I did this I was thinking of just doing 301 redirects to the new pages and hopefully the hit from the search engines wouldn't be too bad. Can anyone speak from experience as to what the best way to go about doing this would be so I don't end up falling back ranking wise. Would change the URLs end up helping me or hurting me? Thanks
Technical SEO | | wmwmeyer0 -
Disallowing https URLs
It there a problem disallowing all https URLs to be indexed in order to avoid duplication? This is the article recommending this practice - http://blog.leonardchallis.com/seo/serve-a-different-robots-txt-for-https/ Thanks!
Technical SEO | | theLotter0 -
Products with discrete URLs for each color
here is the issue. i have an ecommerce site that on a category page, shows each individual color for each product sold. and there is a distinct URL for each color. each product page shares the same content, with the only potentially differentiating factor being customer reviews (not nearly enough of these to differentiate anything). so we have URLs like: www.domain.com/product-green www.domain.com/product-yellow www.domain.com/product-red and so on. i am looking for a way to consolidate these URL while still showing all colors on the category page. the first solution i am considering is using the hash tag. so we would create www.domain.com/product#green, www.domain.com/product#yellow, www.domain.com/product#red. if possible, i would set the canonical tag as www.domain.com/product. the second solution would be to use the canonical tag and keep the URLs as is. the issue i see here is that we would need to create www.domain.com/product and show that page somewhere. www.domain.com/product would the URL that the above color URLs would canonicalize to. what would be the preferred solution? or is there something else?
Technical SEO | | rakesh_patel0