Should I change or redirect this URL?
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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
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Thanks for the help everyone. I kind of forgot if I'm redirecting it, then there's no problem with the old page. Thanks for the confirmation and the reminder! I appreciate it.
Have a great Memorial Day Weekend!
- Ruben
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Dana your thought was right on. Also you don't even really need to worry about changing anything on the "old" page per se. You could just open up the .htaccess file on your server and redirect the old page to the new. For example:
Redirect old file path to new file path Redirect
/olddirectory/oldfile.html http://example.com/newdirectory/newfile.html
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As the other guys said, just go ahead and do the redirect. It would at least help if someone is looking up the new attorney by name. To address the other part of your question, that page that you redirect will not be "blank" as you are telling Google with the 301 redirect that the page has moved.
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As far as I know, Google recognizes 301 and follows them. So your new URL should rank automatically after some time in the SERPs. Also the link juice from the old URL will follow to the new one, if you choose a 301 redirect.
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Yes, you should do what you described. You don't need to "delete" the content on the old page before moving it to the new one. Create the new page, redirect the old one.
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