Site restructure question
-
Our site was deigned years ago to target customers in specific cities, now we've grown beyond this and I believe it is time to change the site structure.
Ignore the 302 from the root page.Current structure: (assuming you've never been to our site before)
projectmanagementacademy.net 302->/select-location.php
/select-location.php -> /city-name/pmp-training.php This page was meant to be a "homepage" for each city, pointless page really
/city-name/pmp-training.php -> /ciy-name/product-name.php These pages are for each individual product
My suggested site structure:
/city-name/pmp-training.php becomes projectmanagementacademy.net no more redirect /city-name/pmp-training.php gets removed and 301 to root page.
/product-name.php each product's page and you would select a location when necessary (some products are online only) would 301 each /city-name/product-name to corresponding product page
/product-name/city-name.php could add these pages if we still wanted the city name in url for city specific products
My thoughts here are /product-name.php would receive a higher % of link juice because there are fewer page between 2 vs 4 if you came to the root page. and 2 vs 3 if you came from the select-location page. Also instead of being split between over 50 locations, all these would be together on one page.
- Your thoughts?
- Would this change improve our SERP for those product pages?
- Would we see a drop off in traffic if we did this?
- How long, if done correctly, would it take to see the recovery of rankings and traffic?
- Could we 301 /select-location.php to the root page?
Thanks in advance for your insights to this. Any answer is a good answer.
Trenton
-
You guys are awesome and lifesavers! I'll report back, after we do the change, and let everyone know how this all went! Thanks a million!
-
Trenton this is a great question. Yes, you should go ahead and redirect that page to the new home page, as it was your former home page. Even though the content is different you should be able to move the pagerank over to the new home page by use of the 301 redirect. Google does treat some redirects to the home page as a 404, such as when someone redirects every page from one domain to the homepage of another, but I think you will be fine in this situation.
-
I think it would be a good idea to redirect your select-location page to your new homepage. You will be able to take advantage of the link juice obtained, before Google re-indexes your pages. Moreover, doing a redirect is better than directing your visitors to a 404 page - they will be annoyed with the latter and likely to leave your site immediately.
-
I appreciate the response, hopefully we can get a moz employee to help out too. It would go a long way in convincing the dev team that the change is necessary. I did multiple searches and never truly found concrete document saying how this would affect us.
Also, could we 301 our select-location page to our new homepage? They would not be the same content and I was curious if this would have a negative effect on our website. That page has the majority of the backlinks to our site, and I'd rather not lose them.
-
Hi Trenton,
If I understand correctly, you are restructuring your site to a product-centric structure, as compared to a location-centric structure? If that is the case, I certainly think this is a better structure. From what I see, you have similar content across each of your city site, which doesn't look good from a SEO perspective since they can be treated as duplicate content. If your company is offering the same range of products across several locations, it will be a good idea to focus on developing product pages as compared to city pages.
You may notice a slight drop in SERP temporarily by when changing your site structure, but with proper 301 redirects and some time, your SERP shouldn't be greatly affected. Consolidating information on your site will go a long way in improving your SERP in the long term.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Aggregator/comparitor site outranking us
Hi I would like to know if anyone has experience with trying to outrank an aggregator/comparitor website. We are being beat by one that also includes our range of products in their comparisons and I was wondering if there was a smart way around this?
On-Page Optimization | | Discovery_SA2 -
Image Titles and Descriptions Question
Hello, I have a question about optimizing the SEO on my pages through image titles and descriptions. There are a few times on my website that I use the same image on multiple pages. I am under the impression that giving it a title such as "social-media-marketing-agency-graphic.jpg" will help the SEO for the phrase "social media marketing agency" on that page. My question was, if I want to use the same image on multiple pages, am I better off uploading an entirely new image with a new title to make it more relevant to the new page? Or will this not make large enough of a difference? Or is there an easier solution? Please let me know your thoughts on how to best optimize the pages
On-Page Optimization | | brightsocial0 -
Any scripts for automated interlinking of sites?
I have heard about similar plugins for Wordpress, but I need something like this to run on all kind of sites, no matter the CSM. Are there universal scripts capable of doing automatic interlinking of pages to rise their weight for SEO purposes? Could you share links to such scripts/sites?
On-Page Optimization | | poiseo0 -
SEO For Replacement Site
I have a client with a website that has gotten a bit outdated. We've already built his new website and optimized it, but I'm trying to figure out the best way to replace the site while doing the least amount of damage to his current Google rankings. He's ranking #1 for some very competitive keywords that are responsible for the bulk of his revenue, so we want to jeopardize that. We've already built a new site and written all new content, although the homepage page title, h1 header and meta descriptions will all remain what they currently are. I'm also trying to keep the keyword density as close to the current site as possible. I am aware of transferring all existing site URLS using 301 redirects. Can anyone provide any tips that I should use when replacing the site? Should I expect a slight rankings drop or am I worrying about nothing?
On-Page Optimization | | atstickel0 -
Tips on URL structure for a site re-design
Wanted to know what you would do with regards to urls – in an ideal world how would you structure them? Keen to know as me and dave are soon to have a meeting about this and were wondering about changing them from the current – http://www.looking4parking.com/airport/gatwick to something like - www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-parking We will soon have pages for the specific parking types that will be a lot more engaging to users with some really useful content on benefits, features, how a certain type of parking works, images, video etc. Currently going to a type of parking, such as meet and greet just brings up a dropdown modal – I was thinking of having the url structure looking like this – www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-meet-and-greet-parking www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-on-site-parking www.looking4parking.com/gatwick-airport-park-and-ride We will then have specific pages for each parking product – in which this product will have unique content built around it – each will have an overview of the product, benefits, features, reviews, images, directions to the car park, find your route and eventually a video on each product So for example we currently have the product “Jet Parks 2” at Manchester airport – the current url is - http://www.looking4parking.com/airport/manchester/park-and-ride/jetparks-2 I would like to change this now we have the opportunity to refresh the whole system, to something along the lines of **domain/location/product title - **www.looking4parking.com/manchester-airport-parking/jetparks-2 or as we have some similar products at certain airports (mainly where the airport has multiple terminals) we would just change it to the following - www.looking4parking.com/manchester-airport-parking/jetparks-3 What are peoples thoughts/opinions on the above?
On-Page Optimization | | RyanCrawf19840 -
Question about URLs
Hello! I have a client that wants to upload an URL like this: www.example.com/keyword/page-name.html The main problem is that www.example.com/keyword/ doesn't exist and gives a 404 error so I'd prefer not doing that...... What do you think about this? And if the client wants to go ahead, is there any solution? A 301 to the final page would help? Thank you in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | Juandbbam0 -
Remove internal site SERPS from Google Index?
1. Internal Serp pages did not have a robots meta tag 2. As a result, client site has thousands (~4,400) of internal site SERP pages in the Google index. 3. We added the NoIndex, Follow attribute to all internal SERPS 4. We Disallowed: domain.com/internal-search-operator in Robots.txt 5. No new SERP pages are being indexed, but the other 4000 something that were already there are still in the index weeks later. 6. The pages are dynamically created and still work, so I can't use the Remove Content tool from google, because the pages don't 404. Is there any way to get these pages out of the index besides just waiting and hoping google eventuall drops them? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | delegator.com0 -
How deep should I go with a directory site?
I am creating a new site which has a directory component. Based on what I have ready I am inclined to keep the site architecture as flat as possible. However, the natural layout that I have come up with in my head has the directory listings 5 or 6 pages deep in the site structure. I saw in another post that someone in a similar situation was suggesting that going deep like this is fine so long as there are many internal links to the deeper pages to indicate that they are important. Should I make a conscious effort to make the site architecture as flat as possible? Are there any specific guides/resources that address this particular issue that I should be aware of? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | fastestmanalive0