New blog post URLs due to WordPress permalink structure changes. Any SEO repercussions?
-
A client site had the follwing URLs for all blog posts: www.example.com/health-news/sample-post
www.example.com/health-news is the top level page for the blog section. While making some theme changes during Google mobilegeddon, the permalink structure got changed to www.example.com/sample-post ("health-news" got dropped from all blog post URLs).
Google has indexed the updated post structure and older URLs are getting redirected (if entered directly in the browser) to the new ones; it appears that WordPress takes care of that automatically as no 301 redirects were entered manually.
It seems that there hasn't been any loss of rankings (however not 100% sure as the site ranks for well over 100 terms).
Do you suggest changing the structure back to the old one?
Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.
-
If you have a very small blog, with a limited number of posts on a narrow topic range, this perhaps doesn't apply.
If you are bigger than that and cover a range of topics, a multilevel structure keeps things organized, for you, your readers, and for search engines.
You can also take advantage of internal linking, organizing sub-topics under topics both so that readers can find related articles that might interest them and so that search engines can see how your posts are related, and what concepts are relevant. [A post titled "Shingles" would mean one thing under health-news, and another under building-materials.]
-
Linda - Thanks for the response!
"If you prefer the two-level structure (which I would, for a couple of reasons)"
Would you elaborate those reasons?
-
If the old URLs are being 301 re-directed to the new URLs, you should not lose much link authority, so that by itself shouldn't be a reason to change back.
If you prefer the two-level structure (which I would, for a couple of reasons) then go ahead and change back, but as Andy says, do it carefully so you are not sending conflicting messages.
-
Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.
I can see no reason not to go back, just take care to ensure any old 301's are removed and that you don't fall into any redirect-chains. That could get messy.
-Andy
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
-
Job Posting Page and Structured Data Issue
We have a website where we do job postings. We manually add the data to our website. The Job Postings are covered by various other websites including the original recruiting organisations. The details of the job posting remain the same, for instance, the eligibility criteria, the exam pattern, syllabus etc. We create pages where we list the jobs and keep the detailed pages which have the duplicate data disallowed in robots.txt. Lately, we have been thinking of indexing these pages as well, as the quantum of these non-indexed pages is very high. Some of our competitors have these pages indexed. But we are not sure whether doing this is gonna be the right move or if there is a safe way to deal with this. Additionally, there is this problem that some job posts have very less data like fees, age limit, salary etc which is thin content so that might contribute to poor quality issue. Secondly, we wanted to use enriched result snippets for our job postings. Google doesn't want snippets to be used on the listing page: "Put structured data on the most detailed leaf page possible. Don't add structured data to pages intended to present a list of jobs (for example, search result pages). Instead, apply structured data to the most specific page describing a single job with its relevant details." Now, how do we handle this situation? Is it safe to allow the detailed pages which have duplicate job data and sometime not so high quality data in robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dailynaukri0 -
Will changing category URLs on site hurt SEO?
Hi Moz Community, We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it. Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise. We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu. So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced. My questions are: If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page? Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way? Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow? Thanks so much for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaraLP1 -
Duplicate URL Parameters for Blog Articles
Hi there, I'm working on a site which is using parameter URLs for category pages that list blog articles. The content on these pages constantly change as new posts are frequently added, the category maybe for 'Heath Articles' and list 10 blog posts (snippets from the blog). The URL could appear like so with filtering: www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016 www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=1 All pages currently have the same Meta title and descriptions due to limitations with the CMS, they are also not in our xml sitemap I don't believe we should be focusing on ranking for these pages as the content on here are from blog posts (which we do want to rank for on the individual post) but there are 3000 duplicates and they need to be fixed. Below are the options we have so far: Canonical URLs Have all parameter pages within the category canonicalize to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general and generate dynamic page titles (I know its a good idea to use parameter pages in canonical URLs). WMT Parameter tool Tell Google all extra parameter tags belong to the main pages (e.g. www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general&year=2016&page=3 belongs to www.domain.com/blog/articles/?taxonomy=health-articles&taxon=general). Noindex Remove all the blog category pages, I don't know how Google would react if we were to remove 3000 pages from our index (we have roughly 1700 unique pages) We are very limited with what we can do to these pages, if anyone has any feedback suggestions it would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Xtend-Life0 -
Help with new site revamp SEO LOST!!!
I decided to go fully WP on my band agency website to help with SEO. I have lost loads of rankings even though we redirected old pages to the new urls. it means i am loosing lots of business atm so I am desperate to find out what I thought was a better SEO design than before. We target geographical and genres in search and they have turned to poop too! Would anyone advise me what I have done wrong and if I need to create some more sales pages to help? site is http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk Thank you, thank you in advance guys... Daniel Morris http://www.themorrisagency.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Agentmorris0 -
Best to Post Dynamic Content (Listings) under "Posts" in Wordpress?
My commercial real estate web site is being migrated to Wordpress from Drupal. Is it advisable to place dynamic content that will use taxonomy under "Posts" ? Listings will be changed every few months and there could be anywhere from several hundred to several thousand of them on the site. Developers have given me different advice. One has been adamant that listings and neighborhood pages (there will be about 25 neighborhood pages) should not be in the post section which is to be strictly reserved for blog entries. The last thing I want is to create a site structure which is unfriendly to SEO!!!! I would very much appreciate the perspective of anyone proficient with Wordpress and SEO. Thanks!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan Rosinsky0 -
Should I change Permalinks?
I have a site that is doing well in rankings, and its also been accepted in to Google news. I have around 800 article live on the site. My current permalink structure is - /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ What I am wondering, would it be better to change it to - /%postname%/ The reason I ask is that most of the well ranking sites and sites built by SEO companies all seem to have the /%postname%/ Will I get a benefit from changing this? I know that I could republish content have the /%postname%/ permalinks. Are there any other benefits? If the is a benefit, I'd perefr to change it as soon as possible before the site grows even more Thanks in advance for anyone who can help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0 -
URL Going Over the Last Page of Pagination - Post Webinar Discussion
**Discussion Question: **Lets say you have 33 pages of paginated content but someone lands on page 34+, what do you do? I just setup a variable on my site so when someone lands on a page that is over the page count they are redirected to the last page of the paginated content. My reasoning is the user is looking for the last page, so why not redirect them to it? Now I just saw in the latest webinar on ecommerce (by Everett Sizemore) that he recommends a 404… should I switch? Why a 404? Again, what do you guys do when you encounter this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
Effect of URL change on Website
Hello we are developers and we have just created a new webpage for a client of us. The problem is that we can not replace the old one by the new one, cause our client has developed over 15 satellite pages that calls directly to the code of the old page. If we completly remove the old page we will make those 15 pages go down. Those pages are working over domains specially register for SEO reasons. For example Main page is www.euroair.es Satellite page is www.aireacondicionadodaikin.com Satellite page has pretty good ranking for search term "aire acondicionado daikin" As I told you, we have a new page but we can not make the page work over root domain. So we thought we could make it work over www.euroair.es/es, and make a redirection 301 of homepage and another important inner pages. We chose "/es" folder because it seems like a language folder, but we are not very sure of the effects of pages working on that folder instead of working on root directory. What do you think? Is this matter important or doesn't? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite.com0