Changing URIs
-
About 2 months ago, my client changed its domain—using 301 redirect—and took the hit in search results. Here's my question: If I convince the client to revert to their old URI, will that help or hurt their SEO?
Follow-up, can it hurt to change interior URIs to something that better reflects the page content?
Thanks.
-
Thanks for your time, Ryan. I appreciate it.
-
Reverting will likely further extend whatever effects they're experiencing in the time delay that goes along with a domain name change... Take a look a this post from a couple of years ago regarding site migration: http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos. From that you can likely find some missing steps or URLs along the way that would benefit from being fixed. Again, reverting is no guarantee at all that rankings will return or that they would return quickly. Best to move forward with the new site and possible fixes that relate to keeping it on it's new domain as aggressively as possible. Good luck!
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
-
How to deal with URLs when changing shopping cart software to ensure SEO
NSFW ALERT (LINK BELOW) We are changing the shopping section of our website. Currently the products sit on our own website and when a user goes to checkout they are taken to Mals (a shopping cart site). This means our URL’s look like this. NSFWhttps://www.aprilnites.com.au/mascara_vibe.htmlThe new software is Ecwid and we are using this with a site created in RapidWeaver so the URLs will not be clean and will have all ? And # parameters. I’m wondering if this will hurt the SEO of our whole site or just the product pages. I’m also unsure of how best to deal with the current URLs. Should I use a 301 redirect on all of them to take the user back to the home page of the shop. For us the shop is more of a catalogue. Our main website is the most important part but I want to make sure we are following best practice when making this change. Hope someone can help.Many thanks
Technical SEO | | AprilN0 -
Should we change our URLs for SEO benefit?
Hi, I'm currently covering a maternity marketing role at i-escape and one our main objectives is to increase organic traffic to the website. i-escape has a selection of hand-picked boutique hotels, villas, lodges, guesthouses and apartments for people to discover and book. At the moment each hotel page URL follows this structure: https://www.i-escape.com/hotelname We'd like to change this to include some searchable words in the URL dependent on the type of hotel. For example: https://www.i-escape.com/boutique-hotels/hotelname or https://www.i-escape.com/boutique-apartments/hotelname If we do go ahead, we know we need to make sure all old style URLs canonically redirect to the new style. Is having the keyword in the URL important enough for us to change over 1500 URLs on the website? We have quite a high quality links pointing to these hotel pages URLs. Also, will this help us with navigation/user journeys/crawls as there will be a /boutique-hotels/hotelname rather than just /hotelname? Thanks so much all! Clair
Technical SEO | | iescape0 -
IP Change
Hello MOZ friends! We recently changed servers and subsequently had a change in IP. It's a better and faster server but have seen a significant drop in SERPS. Could this be a result of moving the site? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Preserving Social Shares Through URL Changes
We are making significant URL changes to our website. Because the URL is changing the social sharing buttons are not showing previous shared counts. I have read several resources like the one below that is linked to in several other similar questions. http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration However I would love to get some insight from someone who has done this and there thoughts on the outcome. As an ecommerce site the "Social Proof" of products that have received social shares is a big deal to us. In Mike Kings example above the counts are being attributed to the OLD URL which is problematic over time. Our site has been up for over 12 years and has had several major changes to it, and I am certain there will be more in the future, being able to preserve the count on the current URL is ideal. While I agree with him that over time I believe social platforms will let data pass through 301 redirects, until then I need to find the best way to do this. Also with his example and others I have seen people mention than new likes from the new url can reset the counter. If you have gone through this and have ideas pleas share them. I look forward to your thoughts thanks.
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC1 -
Web address change - Search impact?
Hi, I have whosjack.org and wjlondon.com - on there is a London relevant news and events website. whosjack.org has been the main site for some time and has decent search pick up. Currently wjlondon.com just redirects to whosjack.org. However - having london in our actual address would be far more beneficial for us. So ideally I want to swap the two web addresses around. Have the main site at wjlondon and have whosjack redirecting to it. However - I don't want to loose traffic from search. An idea I had was to create a sept site at wjLondon that was a feed of social content and links from whosjack so that it starts to get a decent search and then swap them over but not sure whether that would actually be detrimental what with all the dupe content issues with google etc. Any thoughts?
Technical SEO | | luwhosjack0 -
Google Change of Address with Questionable Backlink Profile
We have a .com domain where we are 301-ing the .co.uk site into it before shutting it down - the client no longer has an office in the UK and wants to focus on the .com. The .com is a nice domain with good trust indicators. I've just redesigned the site, added a wad of healthy structured markup, had the duplicate content mostly rewritten - still finishing off this job but I think we got most of it with Copyscape. The site has not so many backlinks, but we're working on this too and the ones it does have are natural, varied and from trustworthy sites. We also have a little feature on the redesign coming up in .Net magazine early next year, so that will help. The .co.uk on the other hand has a fair few backlinks - 1489 showing in Open Site Explorer - and I spent a good amount of time matching the .co.uk pages to similar content on the .com so that the redirects would hopefully pass some pagerank. However, approximately a year later, we are struggling to grow organic traffic to the .com site. It feels like we are driving with the handbrake on. I went and did some research into the backlink profile of the .co.uk, and it is mostly made up of article submissions, a few on 'quality' (not in my opinion) article sites such as ezine, and the majority on godawful and broken spammy article sites and old blogs bought for seo purposes. So my question is, in light of the fact that the SEO company that 'built' these shoddy links will not reply to my questions as to whether they received a penalty notification or noticed a Penguin penalty, and the fact that they have also deleted the Google Analytics profiles for the site, how should I proceed? **To my mind I have 3 options. ** 1. Ignore the bad majority in the .co.uk backlink profile, keep up the change of address and 301's, and hope that we can just drown out the shoddy links by building new quality ones - to the .com. Hopefully the crufty links will fade into insignificance over time.. I'm not too keen on this course of action. 2. Use the disavow tool for every suspect link pointing to the .co.uk site (no way I will be able to get the links removed manually) - and the advice I've seen also suggests submitting a reinclusion request afterwards- but this seems pointless considering we are just 301-ing to the new (.com) site. 3. Disassociate ourselves completely from the .co.uk site - forget about the few quality links to it and cut our losses. Remove the change of address request in GWT and possibly remove the site altogether and return 410 headers for it just to force the issue. Clean slate in the post. What say you mozzers? Please help, working myself blue in the face to fix the organic traffic issues for this client and not getting very far as yet.
Technical SEO | | LukeHardiman0 -
Frequent server changes
Hey guys. I have a server related question. One of our websites is hosted with a nasty slow company, and we want to make a change. The problem we have is that the site is 6 months old so it started on one server, the client then moved it to this slow host about 2 months ago, we now want to move it again. Will this negatively affect search engine rankings? As ever, thanks in advance 🙂
Technical SEO | | Nextman0 -
Google Places and Name Change
Hello - I have a client who is a realtor and changed agencies. I edited their Google Places entry and the new name of their agency and address are showing - but so is their old listing. The agency they left is now trying to sue them for showing up in a number one position with Google Places under their agency name. Is this an indexing issue with Google? Their name shows up under both agency names. The corrected one shows most often, but the old one is still popping up on occasion. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | seoessentials1