Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI
      Moz Local

      Let your reputation grow with Reviews AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    6
    1360
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • kirin44355
      kirin44355 last edited by

      Hello good people of the MOZ community,

      I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall.

      Some examples of the **old **URLS would be

      https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
      https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
      https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
      https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.html

      The new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement

      https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
      https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
      https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
      https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.html

      My worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine.

      The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live.

      Is there a great SEO risk to doing this? 
      Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. 
      Is there anything else I am missing?

      I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage.

      Thanks in advance,
      Chris Gorski

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Charles-O
        Charles-O @kirin44355 last edited by

        Hey K.

        Happy you found value in everyone's response here.

        For your URL, I see your structure resemble a blog structure with your subfolder being "learn" instead of "blog". So if it is, your final URL that you described is fine (learn/buying-guide-for-inline-skates).
        As a counterpoint, if you had this content as a hub page (some form of content pillar/topic cluster) for example, it would've been a good possibility to just change the URL structure since you have many Buying Guides. Different types of content, different ways to put it on your site. 
        Like so: /buying-guide/inline-skates

        At the end of the day, the structure needs to be logical and reflective of where your content is. I think you got it right anyway.

        For the execution part;

        1. I would not recommend using the "crawl as Googlebot" function in search console. It would be way too time-consuming for you, and it is not really designed for that kind of work.
        2. Instead, update your sitemap with the final URLs and send it again via SearchConsole / Bing Webmastertools.
        3. Also, don't forget to go ahead and change the internal links pointing to the old URL to point directly to the new ones or else you'll just have a bunch of 301's crawled by Google. Make it seamless.
        4. Monitor. Monitor. Monitor.

        Hope that helped!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • kirin44355
          kirin44355 last edited by

          Thanks all the for responses and I am taking to heart all your suggestions. I will make all the URLs lowercase as this is something I didn't take into account.

          Due to site hosting platform limitation for the URL structure I need to have a value in the bold areas below:

          https://www.inlineskates.com/learn/buying-guide-for-inline-skates,default,pg.html

          The first value "learn" doesn't have to be unique but the 2nd "learn/buying-guide-for-inline-skates" is the driver for the URL and must be unique, so the short URL like https://www.inlineskates.com/buying-guide/Inline-Skates,default,pg.html wouldn't work since I would only be able to use it 1x for inline skates and have several content pieces that I would need to add that to, size guides, charts, etc.

          My main concern is about the process of doing the redirects, say I do 50 in one day, what is my next step? Is there a way to run the fetch as googlebot to a handful of pages as I only see the ability to add 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. If I go ahead and do this I just want to do it in the smartest way possible.

          Thanks, Chris

          Charles-O 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • Charles-O
            Charles-O @EGOL last edited by

            And to add to that, Moz has a great resource on how to write them (emphasis mine);

            • Keeping URLs as simple, relevant, compelling, and accurate as possible is key to getting both your users and search engines to understand them.

            • URLs should be definitive but concise.

            • When necessary for readability, use hyphens to separate words. URLs should not use underscores, spaces, or any other characters to separate words.

            • Use lowercase letters. In some cases, uppercase letters can cause issues with duplicate pages.

            • Avoid the use of URL parameters, if possible, as they can create issues with tracking and duplicate content. If parameters need to be used (UTM codes, e.g.), use them sparingly.

            Source - https://moz.com/learn/seo/url

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • EGOL
              EGOL last edited by

              The new URLs seem pretty verbose.

              If this was my site, I would consider...

              https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Inline-Skates/
              https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Kids-Inline-Skates/
              https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Inline-Hockey-Skates/
              https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Aggressive-Skates/

              My breadcrumbs would look similar....

              Home >> Buying Guide >> Inline Skates

              Charles-O 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • WebElaine
                WebElaine last edited by

                I've heard recent claims that you no longer lose link juice when 301ing, but I've also had personal experience with taking a hit to organic traffic when doing this type of major URL restructuring. You're right, in the long run, it does pay off, but you're also right that there may be a ding in the short term.

                While you're in there, I would highly, highly recommend taking the additional step of removing ",default,pg" from your URLs. There are two problems with that string - one is it contains commas, which can be problematic. Anything other than plain text and hyphens is generally discouraged in URLs. The other problem is that "default pg" part is watering down your URL and does not contribute to making the links short and easy to type and understand for humans. Since you are undertaking such a massive restructuring, now is the time to make these additional tweaks - as it's less painful to do All The Things at once and take one hit, than it would be to take a hit now and another hit later when you tackle that separately. I personally also always use only lowercase characters in my URLs as it's easier to type and depending on the server OS improper capitalization may make it so they don't reach the right page, but that is more of a UX preference than an SEO enhancement.

                Another couple of tips: I find it extremely helpful to map everything out on a spreadsheet in this type of migration. Helps me make sure I have the old and the new mapped out, and also helps to have a checklist to go through systematically. I also tend to group related pages in batches, as presumably related pages will be linked to each other, and once Google comes crawling back over one page it will see the new URLs and crawl those too, faster than it would crawl unrelated pages. Finally, use a HTTP header check tool (google that and you'll find several) after you add the redirects just to make 100% certain you've set everything up correctly. And where possible, mass-redirect in a single .htaccess rule rather than one by one.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • aaronfernandez

                  Do bulk 301 redirects hurt seo value?

                  We are working with a content based startup that needs to 301 redirect a lot of its pages to other websites. Will give you an example to help you understand. If we assume this is the startups domain and URL structure www.ourcompany.com/brand1/article What they want to do is do a 301 redirect of www.ourcompany.com/brand1/ to www.brand1.com I have never seen 301 as a problem to SEO or link juice. But in this case where all the major URLs are getting redirected to other sites i was wondering if it would have a negative effect. Right now they have just 20-30 brands but they are planning to hit a couple of hundreds this year.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aaronfernandez
                  0
                • TaraLP

                  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 | | TaraLP
                  1
                • Eric_Lifescript

                  Bad SEO Practice: in title tag?

                  Greetings, I just discovered that some of our content was produced with
                  tags in the title tag. Example: <title>Diabetes Symptoms <br> In Women Over 40</title> My gut says this is bad for SEO, but I couldn't find a definitive answer on the web, so I thought I would ask the community of gurus here at Moz. 🙂 Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript
                  0
                • BrandBuilder

                  New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?

                  We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder
                  0
                • shannmg1

                  Mega Menu Navigation Best Practice

                  First off, I'm a landscape/nature/travel photographer. I mainly sell prints of my work. I'm in the process of redesigning my website, and I'm trying to decide whether to keep the navigation extremely simple or leave the drop-down menu for galleries. Currently, my navigation is something like this: Galleries
                   > Gallery for State or Country (example: California)
                    > Sub-region in State or Country (example: San Francisco)
                  Blog
                  Prints
                  About
                  Contact Selling prints is the top priority of the website, as that's what runs the business. I have lots of blog content, and I'm starting to build some good travel advice, etc. but in reality, the galleries, which then filter down to individual pages for each photo with a cart system, are the most important. What I'm struggling to decide is whether to leave the sort of "mega menu" for the galleries, or to do away with them, and have the user go to the overall galleries page to navigate further into the site. Leaving the mega menu intact, the galleries page becomes a lot less important, and takes out a step to get to the shopping cart. However, I'm wondering if the amount of galleries in the drop down menu is giving TOO many choices up front as well. I also wonder how changing this will affect search. Any thoughts on which is better or is it really just a matter of preference?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shannmg1
                  0
                • TomNYC

                  Redirecting to a new domain... a second time

                  Hi all, I help run a website for a history-themed podcast and we just moved it to its second domain in 7 years. We've had very good SEO up until last week, and I'm wondering if I screwed up the way I redirected the domains. It's like this: Originally the site was hosted at "first.com", and it acquired inbound links. However, we then started to host the site on blogger, so we... Redirected the site to "second.blogspot.com". (Thus, 1 --> 2) It stayed here for about 7 years and got lots of traffic. Two weeks ago we moved it off of blogger and into Wordpress, so we 301 redirected everything to... third.com. (Thus, 1 --> 2 --> 3) The redirects worked, and when we Google individual posts, we are now seeing them in Google's index at the new URL. My question: What about the 1--> 2 redirect? There are still lots of links pointing to "first.com". Last week I went into my GoDaddy settings and changed the first redirect, so that first.com now points to third.com. (Thus 1 --> 3, and 2-->3) I was correct in doing that, right? The drop in Google traffic I've seen this past week makes me think that maybe I screwed something up. Should we have kept 1 --> 2 --> 3? (Again, now we have 1-->3 and 2-->3) Thanks for any insights on this! Tom

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC
                  1
                • ydesjardins200

                  Help FORUM ( User generated content ) SEO best practices

                  Hello Moz folks ! For the very first time im dealing with a massive community who rely on UGC ( user generated content ). Their forum is finding a great deal of duplicate content/broken link/ duplicate title and on-site issue. I have Advance SEO knowledge related to ecommerce or blogging but new to forum and UGC. I would really love to learn or get ressources links that would allow me to see/understand the best practices in term of SEO. Any help is greatly appreciated. Best, Yan

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ydesjardins200
                  0
                • lara_dar

                  Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?

                  I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
                  ...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.