Changing all urls
-
A client of mine has a wordpress website that is installed in a directory, called "site".
So when you go to www.domain.com you are redirected to www.domain.com/site.
We all know how bad it is to have a redirect fron your subdomain to another page. In this case I measured a loss of 5 points of page authority.
The question is: what is the best practice to remove the "site" from the address and changing all the urls?
- Should I use the webmaster tool to tell to Google that the site is moving? It's not 100% true, cause the site is just moving one level up.
- Should I install a copy of the website under www.domain.com and just redirect 301 every old page to its new url? This way I think the site would be deindexet for 2/3 months.
Any suggestions or tips welcome!
Thanks DoMiSol
-
A pleasure! In answer to your questions:
- there is a slight risk of a temporary blip, but assuming you do everything correctly at the same time, the transfer should be seamless and any ranking changes minimal and very temporary.
- Not as far as I know. Changing the permalink structure doesn't cause 301-redirects to be put in place so you will need to do that separately. You could do that in the htaccess file or you could use a plug-in. We like to use John Godley's Redirection Plug-In or there is another here.
Best of luck.
-
Thank you Nick.
I have 2 more questions:
-
Do you think that doing this I risk any ranking drop? If so, how big and for how long?
-
Will Wordpress internal links work just the same? I mean should I only strip the "site" from the Wordpress URL in the General Settings of Wordpress?
Thank you again,
DoMiSol
-
-
I believe you will be best to do two things:
- put in place a global 301 rule to redirect any URL with /site/ in it to the same without /site/. If the site is hosted on Apache this is relatively easy to do in htaccess if you get your commands right. You can destroy a site if you're not careful though...so take care. If you don't know htaccess find someone close by who does!
- re-configure the root directory of the domain on the server to point at the sub-directory directly. Using e.g. Plesk and command line this is pretty trivial to do. This will have the effect of the server retrieving content directly from the sub-directory...if you set it up correctly it will be as if /site/ doesn't exist.
You will need to do these both at the same time, and assuming you get it all right there shouldn't be any interruption in service, although there will be a period when a mixture of /site/ and non-/site/ URLs are indexed.
Installing another copy of the site is fraught with risk as you could end up with a serious duplicate content problem, ranking drops etc....far simpler to reconfigure the server and domain.
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
-
Category url with resultsperpage loop
Hi there, We upgraded our webshop last weekend and our moz crawl on monday found a lot of errors we are trying to fix. I am having some communication problems with our webmaster so I need a little help. We have extremely long category pages url, does anyone have a guess which kind of mistake our webmaster could make:
Technical SEO | | isabelledylag
https://site-name.pl/category-name?page=3?resultsPerPage=53?resultsPerPage=53 .... And it keeps on repeating the string ?resultsPerPage=53 exactly 451 times as if there was some kind of loop. Thanks in advance for any kind of hint 🙂
Kind regards,
Isabelle0 -
What to do with existing URL when replatforming and new URL is the same?
We are changing CMS from WordPress to Uberflip. If there is a URL that remains the same I believe we should not create a redirect. However, what happens to the old page? Should it be deleted?
Technical SEO | | maland0 -
SEO URLs: 1\. URLs in my language (Greek, Greeklish or English)? 2\. Αt the end it is good to put -> .html? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I must put URLs in my language Greek, Greeklish or in English? And at the end of url it is good to put -> .html? For exampe www.test.com/test/test-test.html ? What is the best way to get great ranking? I am a new digital marketing manager and its my first time who works with a programmer who doesn't know. I need to know as soon as possible, because they want to be "on air" tomorrow! Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Marios
Technical SEO | | marioskal0 -
URL Change, Old URLs Still In Index
Recently changed URLs on a website to remove dynamic parameters. We 301'd the old dynamic links (canonical version) to the cleaner parameter-free URLs. We then updated the canonical tags to reflect these changes. All pages dropped at least a few ranking positions and now Moz shows both the new page ranking slightly lower in results pages and the old page still in the index. I feel like I'm splitting value between the two page versions until the old one disappears... is there a way to consolidate this quickly?
Technical SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Redirect URLS with 301 twice
Hello, I had asked my client to ask her web developer to move to a more simplified URL structure. There was a folder called "home" after the root which served no purpose. I asked for the URLs to be redirected using 301 to the new URLs which did not have this structure. However, the web developer didn't agree and decided to just rename the "home" folder "p". I don't know why he did this. We argued the case and he then created the URL structure we wanted. Initially he had 301 redirected the old URLS (the one with "Home") to his new version (the one with the "p"). When we asked for the more simplified URL after arguing, he just redirected all the "p" URLS to the PAGE NOT FOUND. However, remember, all the original URLs are now being redirected to the PAGE NOT FOUND as a result. The problems I see are these unless he redirects again: The new simplified URLS have to start from scratch to rank 2)We have duplicated content - two URLs with the same content Customers clicking products in the SERPs will currently find that they are being redirect to the 404 page. I understand that redirection has to occur but my questions are these: Is it ok to redirect twice with 301 - so old URL to the "p" version then to final simplified version. Will link juice be lost doing this twice? If he redirects from the original URLS to the final version missing out the "p" version, what should happen to the "p" version - they are currently indexed. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Changing all titles
A new client of mine has a terrible Wordpress site with many issues and one of these is keyword stuffing, especially in the title. We all know how bad it is, but then what's the best way to remove the keywords in excess? They stuffed 4 keywords (average 3 terms per keyword) in the wordpress General Settings "Site Title", so all of them are included in the title, and there are 200 pages basically with the same, stuffed, title. I am pretty sure if I remove them, and put a unique keyword per page I would have a huge rank drop, but is there any way to minimize it? 2nd question: should I improove the on-page factors and wait for the rank drop/resume before starting a linkbuilding campaign? Thank you. DoMiSol
Technical SEO | | DoMiSoL0 -
Should I change my host
Have a feeling that the answer will be obvious here but more opinions are always good... I own a number of domains, mainly com, which are targeted at the UK but hosted in the netherlands. I have noticed a very high number of dutch hits to my sites. Lower than UK but takings population into account it works out to be higher. I fear my decision to renew my dutch server instead of going for a UK one is helping me rank in the wrong part of the world. I have paid a couple of months ahead for the dutch server but am wondering if the cost of writing off a couple of hundred pounds will be less than I'm losing due to my location. Should I take the financial hit on the server in the hope that buying a UK one will increase my relevant traffic?
Technical SEO | | Grumpy_Carl0 -
Advice on strange URL problem
I'm considering doing some pro bono work for a local non-profit and upon initial review they have a number of serious issues but there is one in particular I'd like to check my thinking on. The developer who set up the site some years ago implemented a javascript redirect on their root domain so that it redirects to: http://domain.com/wordpress This is wrong for all kinds of reasons and I want to recommend eliminating this redirect and getting rid of the 'wordpress' part of the path altogether. However, the site is quite established with good PR and they would take a hit by changing the path. I'd do 301 redirects to the new URLs that would not have 'wordpress' in the path in addition to other remediation. My question - is my thinking here good? It's worth it, right? The other option is just get rid of the weird redirect and keep 'wordpress' in the path but this seems unacceptable to me. Any opinions?
Technical SEO | | friendlymachine0