To change or not to change site URL structure?
-
I am learning my way around SEO, having always used professionals for it in the past on previous businesses i have decided to do it myself and learn more about it.
Now the dilemma i am up against is i recently changed some of my permalinks on quite a few main pages throughout the site.
The site launched in April this year so we're quite new. The problem is since my last change i have not seen any increase...a decrease which in fact hasn't recovered at all.
Having now analysed them in more depth and read up more on the whole subject of SEO, (which is endless) i have put together a complete new strategy; with this increased understanding of what i am doing (but by no means conclusive) i want to complete a full overhaul on all SEO (via Wordpress which i use along with YOAST SEO tools), ensuring i have all my keywords, permalinks and descriptions spot on throughout every page, post and picture.
I spent a lot of time mapping these out, ensuring there is no Focus keyword duplication, and that the site is relatively flat in terms of its layout.
What i am unsure about now is whether changing my permalinks again is a bad thing to do?
Could it permanently damage my rep going forward?
Should i just focus on my content and keywords/descriptions?I am at a loss as i don't want to do irreparable damage to our reputation. The site is still reasonable easy to manage so changing now is the best time to do it, but if changing the URLs is a waste of time then i may just forget that and just work on the keywords, descriptions and content.
Advice is 'oh so welcome'
-
Thanks a bunch. Its really a little daunting when it comes to changing the URL structure.
So changing these is ok as long as i have all the 301 redirects in place. CHECK!
Look at hosting two sitemaps for a week or two before removing the old one. CHECK!One thing I spotted in your responses was that you said:
- retain the ending /
- also the first URL structure i used was adequate.
Just wanted to know why?
Also in regards to this URL change, my on page SEO tools mentions that i should try to use the focus keyword in the URL. Is this a big help now? I know it always was before, so just checking nothing has changed.
Obviously if i go back to using - /Locations/uxbridge/ - that doesnt say a lot about the keyword i want to be recognised for, whereas using - /CBT-course-locations/uxbridge/ - on the other hand does.
The latter however this does keep me pretty much locked to this keyword forever, whereas using the original /locations/uxbridge/ comes down to content right?
Have you any final feedback or guidance on this last point?
I cannot tell you how much it helps to have you guys to bounce off - It gets all a little overwhelming on your own sometimes.Thanks again
C -
Hey,
My personal preference would have been to stick with the original URLs /locations/uxbridge and use the rest of the website and localised SEO to promote these locations pages and associate them with a particular service.
However, if your set on changing the URLs then take Joseph's advice and spend some time getting this right. As he says make sure that your redirects do not chain together and any previous URLs point directly to the new URL.
If you make sure that any changes are covered by suitable redirects then the negative effects to your site will be minimal in terms of links lost and if your research is thorough then you should put yourself in a situation where more traffic is available.
With regards to submitting a new sitemap to WMT - I would recommend this. Doing so will let Google know that you have made changes and prompt them to process your new URLs.
In the past I have uploaded the new sitemap as a brand new sitemap alongside the existing one - this allows them to continue seeing the redirected URLs and realise what they are doing. I'd then advise removing the original sitemap from WMT after around a week to two weeks.
This process has worked well for me in the past.
I hope this helps.
-
I would keep the ending slash there. Not for any reason - just preference. Also, try to keep your URLs short and consistent.
I would say scrape all of your URLs and throw everything into excel have a old and new. Spend some time on this as you don't want to change the URL structure after this.
Sidenote: You don't want to stack 301s. Oldest URL -> Prev URL -> Current URL. Both Oldest and Prev should point to Current.
When you're done submit your updated sitemap to both google and bing webmaster tools.
-
Hi Andrew
Ok so here's an example of the URL's i wish to change.
A more major change would be to the way we showcase locations:
Current URL: motorcycle-training-centre-locations/uxbridge/
Planned revision: CBT-course-locations/uxbridge
The reason for this is CBT course offers higher benefits in regards keyword popularity for our industry. I can then amend all the related focus keywords and descriptive text. Plus motorcycle training centre locations seems too long and the choice of keywords i placed within the URL is probably not the best i could have selected.This URL was changed previously from just: Locations/uxbridge as i wanted to focus more on keywords within the URL structure. Now i am at the point of changing it again...i am just cautious of doing so if it doesn't serve us any favours. Personally i am confident it is a better structure but do not want to do irreparable damage to our rep.
What are your thoughts to this?
All in all there are currently around 40 URL's so its relatively small and manageable.
Also i am using wordpress but the URLs did not automatically redirect...i have however set up manual 301 redirects for previous changes.Also, once changed it begs the question should i submit to Google via webmaster tools or just let Google find us?
Soooo many things to consider
-
Changing the structure of your website URLs can be a pretty large undertaking and if mishandled can easily destroy your website - as you seem to have understood.
It's difficult to provide advice about changing them without seeing an example URL. If you could provide a current URL and an example of what you are considering changing the URL to it would be of help.
However, there are definitely benefits to correcting any issues with URLs and it is one of those issue that is best addressed as soon as possible before your website becomes too large and the job becomes mammoth. I'm assuming that since you are using Wordpress your previous URLs automatically redirect to the new permalink?
I would recommend checking that this is correct and going forward ensue that any URLs that you change have a working 301 redirect from the old URL to the new URL. If you forget the redirects or get them wrong you will effectively duplicate content and run the possibility of causing more issues than you started with.
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
-
Why i my site not ranking
I have been building my website www.ubodo.com ( its a property portal ) I have feeds coming in from nearly 200 estate agents and I have just over 26k properties listed all over the world. I have tried to make the site fast, mobile friendly and followed several SEO tutorials but I am looky If I get 10 new visitors a day !!! I have managed to get 1st page ranking for terms like " Property for sale in Hambye" ( less competitve than " Property for Sale in France " ) Can any one see anything obvious I have done wrong, I feel like there is a switch to turn on the traffic and I cant find it. Any help would be greatly appreciated Barry
On-Page Optimization | | Bazconnolly10 -
SEO for E-Commerce Sites
Hi Everybody, I have two e-commerce sites just launched with not much content at the moment just user login pages for the clients to avail the service. The management is not interested to put much content there i think. Maximum what they will be putting only 5 pages of content in total, not more than this. Any practical tips how to optimize such sites especially when there is not much content. Best
On-Page Optimization | | Sequelmed0 -
Should I rewrite all my URLs ?
Hi all, I'm pretty new here and this is a question I'm struggling with since years ! All my URLs are very long. Years ago I wanted to put as many keywords as possible but today I'm not sure anymore it was such a good idea. Example: http://www.spirit-of-metal.com/album-groupe-Take_Me_To_Janus-nom_album-Ripping_the_Heart_from_the_Chest_of_the_Earth-l-en.html The problem is I have more than 300K of these pages. I'm afraid to create a huge mess even if I 301 them all to the new pages. What's your opinion ? Is it worth the effort ? Many thanks in advance for your precious help !
On-Page Optimization | | kivanSOM0 -
Directory site with an URL structure dilemma
Hello, We run a site, which lists local businesses and tag them by their nature of business (similar to Yelp). Our problem is, that our category and sub-category(i.e.: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant or www.example.com/budapest/cars/spare-parts) pages are extremely weak, and get almost no traffic, but most of the traffic (95+ percent) goes for the actual business pages. While this might be a completely normal thing, I still would like to strengthen our category (listing) pages as well, as these should be the ones targeted by some of general keywords, like ‘restaurant’ or ‘restaurant+budapest’. One of the issues I have identified as a possible problem, that we do not have a clear hierarchy within the site, so while the main category pages are linked from the homepage (and the sub-categories from here), there is no bottom-up linking from the business pages back to the category pages, as the business page URLs look like this: www.example.com/business/onyx-restaurant-budapest. I think, that the good site- and url structure for the above would be like this: www.example.com/budapest/restaurant/hungarian/onyx-restaurant. My only issue is, perhaps not with the restaurants but with others, that some of the businesses have multiple tags, so they can be tagged i.e. as car saloon, auto repair and spare parts at the same time. Sometimes, they even have 5+ tags on them. My idea is, that I will try to identify a primary tag for all the businesses (we maintain 99 percent of them right now), and the rest of their tags would be secondary ones. I would then use canonicalization and mark the page with the primary tag in the url as the preferred one for that specific content. With this scenario, I might have several URLs with the same content (complete duplicates), but they would point to one page only as the preferred one, while our visitors could still reach the businesses in any preferred ways, so either by looking for car saloons, auto-repair or spare parts. This way, we could also have breadcrumbs on all the pages, which now we miss completely. Can this be a feasible scenario? Might it have a side-effect? Any hints on how to do it a better way? Many thanks, Andras
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
Articles on our own site?
Hi Guy's Is it better to have articles on our own website under a news section, with keyword phrases that point to relevant pages or is it better to post them on our blog (that is seperate, we use blogger) and point them to relevant pages on our site? or maybe a bit of both? Thanks Daniel
On-Page Optimization | | LushDuck0 -
What is the best practice for changing a url of an existing page
I a looking through the on-page SEO reports in SEOmoz for one of my sites. It suggests that I change the url of a particular page to match the desired search term I want to rank for. In this case it is a site for a local business and the url is example.com/testimonials. when it probabaly should have instead been example.com/city-business-reviews. I have just a couple links to this page and I'm stuck towards the bottom of page 1 in the SERPs currently. Questions... 1. Should I change the url to include the exact keyword term I want the page to rank for? 2. If yes, what is the best method to ensure that any existing link juice to the current url is retained? Would I change the url, then create a new page with the old url and apply a 301 redirect to point it to the new page? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | fastestmanalive0 -
Setting up a domain for a future site
Hi there, That may be a bit of a silly question to ask, but we've setup a new domain for an existing site. While the site is in the making, the site owners wants to already start promoting the new URL on stationeries etc. Hence, we need to setup the new URL so that it forwards to the site, but so that Google doesn't give it the history of a secondary (less important) domain. What is the best way to do this? Currently we've put in a 301 redirect, but will that bear no future consequences on the SEO of the site, when the site is moved to this new domain, and the old domain is 301 redirected. Thanks, SEOeclipse
On-Page Optimization | | Bozboz0 -
All Caps in URL
Hello, we're working with a corporate client to make changes to their URL structure. We recommended that they use a structure like "domain.com/state/city/location". Their IT department is on board, but they just mentioned that all of the state and city info will be pulled from a database where it is all caps. So it would be like this "domain.com/STATE/CITY/location" I'm concerned that it may be spammy, but I can't find any definitive information online. We usually like to test issues like this on our own sites before advising clients, but we're working up against a quick deadline. Any help with this issue would be great, especially real world experience, not just theories. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | interactivek0