Question on changing URL structures
-
We have a lot of "Long URL" errors in moz, and our URLs have no helpful format to them. For example, our blog URLs currently have a date and the title so they end up looking like this: blog/year/month/day/long title that never ends.
If I were to setup a new URL structure using MOZ best practices, can I just make the change going forward and redirect a few high trafficked links to this new structure? Or do I really need to make the change for the website (specifically blog) as a whole to see a positive impact? I know this means there may be an initial drop in traffic which I'd like to avoid.
-
Be very careful about changing hierarchy or structure. It does have an effect on where the pages rank.
Any pages that are ranking well (i.e. position 0 to 5) don't even touch them, in fact anything on the first page I would be slow to alter without very good reason.
Anything that is on the second page or worse you haven't got a lot to lose, so restructuring probably would make sense.
-
Hey there,
I assume you're using WordPress default permalink structure. If your site is a large blog I would recommend to check out yoast premium plugin which allows you to set up the 301 redirect at once when you change the permalink structure. If it's a small blog you can do that with other free plugins that help set up 301 redirects as well.
-
To get the full benefit of changing the link structure it's probably a good idea to structure the whole thing correctly as opposed to just throwing it on top of the links you have now. As long as you do the redirects right, it should be a smooth process.
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
-
404 Crawl Diagnostics with void(0) appended to URL
Hello I am getting loads of 404 reported in my Crawl report, all appended with void(0) at the end. For example: http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0)
Moz Pro | | moshen
The site is running on Drupal 7, Has anyone come across this before? Kind Regards Moshe | http://lfs.org.uk/films-and-filmmakers/watch-our-films/1289/void(0) |0 -
Woocommerce filter urls showing in crawl results, but not indexed?
I'm getting 100's of Duplicate Content warnings for a Woocommerce store I have. The urls are
Moz Pro | | JustinMurray
etc These don't seem to be indexed in google, and the canonical is for the shop base url. These seem to be simply urls generated by Woocommerce filters. Is this simply a false alarm from Moz crawl?0 -
URL Parameters causing duplicate content - Login/Registration page
All, I just recently acquired a new client and right away I noticed an abundance of duplicate content being recorded after the moz crawl diagnostics was completed. After a quick digest of the issue, it seems that the majority (90%) of the outlined duplicated content is stemming from the client's Login/Registration page. Upon clicking (without being logged-in) any asset or forum discussion board link within the site, the user is automatically redirected to the Login/Registration page, which seems to create this massive redirect loop associated with dynamic url parameters. Ex. After clicking on a select internal link (asset or discussion board) the user is redirected to the Login/Register page which presents the page and a URL that looks a lot this this: Ex. 1 https://www.clientsite.com/register-login?ReturnUr...xxxx%xxxx%xxxx%...... Ex. 2 https://www.clientsite.com**/register-login?returnurl=/register-login?returnurl=/register-login?returnurl=/page-titl**e/ These URLs seem to becoming larger and larger... The client wants to ensure users have to Login/Register within their site before they're allowed to view the content. This process doesn't allow for any type of preview page to be viewed by a user prior to clicking on the internal link, which in turn doesn't allow any preview pages to be indexed. Right now, Moz is picking up all of the redirect and labeling them as duplicate page content/duplicate page titles based on the Login/Registration page. Questions/Comments: Would it be wise to create preview pages for the asset pages and discussion board pages to allow for proper indexing? - Could this be a CMS issue? Current being used on this is, Kentico. There are thousands of pages being recorded in the crawl as duplicate, however only 14 seem to be indexing with duplicate title tags. 301 or canonical redirect strategy? Moz crawl data issue? Again, this is my first look at this issue, so more information is bound to come out soon! Please let me know if anyone has run into this issue and if you have a possible solution to get rid of this redirect loop process. Thanks! -T
Moz Pro | | MattLacuesta0 -
Long URLs
My website is hosted by Hubspot. When I create a blog, the URL, as an example, would be: http://www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/27061/Manage-By-the-Numbers/ Instead I am getting the URL below. Google Webmaster tools and moz see this as an error and google says it can't crawl because it is a non-existent page. Users cannot see this page, and Hubspot can't figure it out, but google and moz see it. This problem is occurring on about 25 blogs out of 150. Any ideas? And thanks. URL: http://www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/27061/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/Manage-By-the-Numbers URL: http://www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/27061/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/www.boxtheorygold.com/blog/bid/12158/Manage-By-the-Numbers
Moz Pro | | Rong0 -
Question #3) My last question has to do with Some SEOmoz crawl diagnostics -
I recently fixed (or well, I am asking to make sure that this was the right thing to do in my first question posted a few minutes ago), a problem where all of my internal main sidebar category pages were linking using https://, which to my knowledge means SECURE pages. anyways, OSE, and google seem to be not recognizing the link juice. but my rank fell for one of my main keywords by 2 positions about a week after i made the fix to have the pages be indexable. Making my pages properly linked can't be a bad thing right? That's what I said. So I looked deeper, and my crawl diagnostics reports showed a MASSIVE reduction in warnings (about 3,000 301 redirects were removed by changing the https:// to http:// because all the secure pages were re-directing to http:// regular structure) and an INCREASE, in Duplicate Page Titles, and Temporary redirects... Could that have been the reason the rank dropped? I think I am going to fix all the Duplicate Page Title problems tonight, but still, I am a little confused as to why such a major fix didn't help and appeared to hurt me. I feel like it hurt the rank, not because of what I did, but because what I did caused a few extra re-directs, and opened the doors for the search engine to discover more pages that had problems (which could have triggered an algo that says hey, these people have to much duplicate problems) Any thoughts will be GREATLY appreciated thumbed, thanked, and marked as best answers! Thanks in advance for your time, Tyler A.
Moz Pro | | TylerAbernethy0 -
I am trying to find inbound links for one of my site urls. My question is does SEOMoz able to track all internal links as the Open Site Explorer shows 0 internal links?
It shows 0 internal links when I am pretty sure we have multiple internal links.Should we use absolute urls or relative urls for internal links?
Moz Pro | | SulekhaUSLLC0 -
Campaign Domain "change" (www. vs no www.)
Hello, I'm tracking a domain (with www.thespin.be) since months. Last week we changed things related to domain & server and now SEOmoz has 0 pages crawled. I think that's because now my main domain is without www. (thespin.be). How can I modify my campaign to reflect this "change" (that's not really a new domain..) to avoid losing all my campaign history ? Also, on Google Webmaster Tools it's like I have 2 different sites (one with www. and another without), although I've defined my favorite domain (without www.) months ago.. Google won't update its index. And I have this problem on several other sites.. Thank you very much for giving me a feedback. Regards Jean-Louis
Moz Pro | | JeanlouisSEO1 -
How to remove URLS from from crawl diagnostics blocked by robots.txt
I suddenly have a huge jump in the number of errors in crawl diagnostics and it all seems to be down to a load of URLs that should be blocked by robots.txt. These have never appeared before, how do I remove them or stop them appearing again?
Moz Pro | | SimonBond0