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Changing a parent category and 301 redirecting
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I have a set of three pages that are subpages of a parent. The structure is as follows:
mysite.com/directory/personal-widgets
mysite.com/directory/commercial-widgets
mysite.com/directory/widgets-services
The partent page name "directory" really isn't working for where I want these pages to evolve. So I want to change it to "guides"
In a world without worrying about google, I would simply change the parent page to guides, so they look like this, and be done with it:
mysite.com/guides/personal-widgets
But, the obvious problem is that I have external links to the page now. And the pages have a nice PR. And they also have Facebook page Likes and I don't know if I'll lose those.
I know that if I should do this I should redirect the pages to the new pages of course.
My question is:
Will redirecting the old URL to the new URL with a 301 cause anything negative to happen that I might not be expecting? Does Google dislike Redirects for any reason, or understand they are sometimes necessary?
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Google won't think it's shady... they recently released a video that says they follow multiple redirects (but if you have too many, it will reflect poorly).
Why get rid of a redirect at all? I would set a canonical url as well as keep the 301 redirect.
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What do you think Google thinks of a site that has redirects in it, I mean overall. Do they perhaps think something shady is going on? I've got another site that I have to redirect about a dozen pages (and it's not a big site), as I migrate a poorly designed site to a better one. The redirects will be from URL like .../sample-page.php to .../sample-page. What will Google think of that?
And if some pages I've redirected don't have links to them, and I'm only concerned with the search engines changing the indexed pages, how long do I need to keep the redirects active?
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Common consensus: 301 redirects will drop your rankings for ~ 2 weeks but you should bounce back in rankings after then. You do lose a small amount of link juice but if the word "guides" is a common search term for your widget queries, it might be worth the move.
In addition, I would review the backlinks you currently have, sort out the most powerful backlinks, and contact the respective webmasters to change the URL to the new address and avoid the redirect.
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