URL 301 Re-direct

[SEOCT]

Hello,

If we publish a blog post with a url which accidentally contains a number at the end (blog.companyname.com/subject-title-0), is it best-practice to update the URL (e.g. to blog.companyname.com/subject-title) and put in a 301 re-direct from the old to the new one or should it simply be left as is?

I've read that 301's lose link equity and relevance so is it really worth re-directing for the sake of a cleaner url?

Thanks for your input!

John

[Trymybest]

Thankyou Soo Much. Great Post

[SEOCT]

Great - thanks for taking the time to respond Roman with this insightful post

[Roman-Delcarmen]

Well, the post that you are using as a reference makes sense if you have a website running and one of your pages is getting traffic and you don't know how to deal with a URL error.

1. If your page is ranking on the first page of SERP
2. you have 100 backlinks pointing to your page
3. 2000 user coming every day.

Well, in that case, you will need to evaluate which tactics can give you a better result.

• Option - 1   Keep the URL as its right now.
• Option - 2   Replace it with a new one.

You will need to know if your new URL will help to rank for new keywords or put you in a better place in the SERP, also how is performing your competition for that specific keyword, what about the anchor text of your external and internal links.

So you make an analysis to see it is worth the risk. Usually SEO expert deal with URL updates adding value to the page, adding content, graphics, images, text. But as I see that is not your case

In the other hands, if you have just an article, I mean a simple article with a few visitors. Probably you want to rank it, but it has no external links, no traffic at all or insignificant traffic and has a low DA. Well, in that case, forget what I told and simple change the URL and stop worrying about it