We changed the URL structure 10 weeks ago and Google hasn't indexed it yet...
-
We recently modified the whole URL structure on our website, which resulted in huge amount of 404 pages changing them to nice human readable urls. We did this in the middle of March - about 10 weeks ago...
We used to have around 5000 404 pages in the beginning, but this number is decreasing slowly. (We have around 3000 now).
On some parts of the website we have also set up a 301 redirect from the old URLs to the new ones, to avoid showing a 404 page thus making the “indexing transmission”, but it doesn’t seem to have made any difference.
We've lost a significant amount of traffic, because of the URL changes, as Google removed the old URLs, but hasn’t indexed our new URLs yet.
Is there anything else we can do to get our website indexed with the new URL structure quicker?
It might also be useful to know that we are a page rank 4 and have over 30,000 unique users a month so I am sure Google often comes to the site quite often and pages we have made since then that only have the new url structure are indexed within hours sometimes they appear in search the next day!
-
Good Point. I'd suggest a canonical on the new pages as well as blasting them to the social media sites for a quicker turnaround.
-
They already has 5000 404 pages. I don't mean block any existing pages which were changed.
I mean only block pages which always returned a 404
-
I agree with Dave except I would not recommend blocking any pages with robots.txt. 301 redirect them all to their new pages.
-
If you have a site with 5000 pages and you decide to change all the page URLs, you will still have a site with 5000 pages. The problem is that Google has no way of understanding how the old pages map to the new ones. You do.
You need to 301 your old pages to your new ones. This method is a win all around.
You lose zero traffic. You keep 90%+ of the link value, and your visitors can find the pages they are looking for.
Right now Google sees your new pages as duplicate content and wont list it.
-
- Have you setup a Google Webmasters account?
- You should submit a sitemap to Webmasters. Info Here
- Also make sure all the 404 pages are blocked by robots.txt
- Add in a 301 redirect from all old content to the new content.
This link is about moving to a new domain but most of the steps still apply.
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
-
Removing Personal content from Google Index
Hi everyone, A user is complaining that her name is appearing in google search through our job ads site, so I removed such ads through Search Console, but the problem is not the ads anymore but our internal search results. The ads are no longer live but our searches has been indexed by google back then, We have been manually taking over 500 pages that included such name but more and more keep coming through pagination, we haven't found a pattern yet so pretty much any search result might have contained such name. We might get some legal issues here, did you guys got into anything similar before? We have just set some rules so that this doesn't happen again, but still can't find a way to deal with this one. Thanks in advance. PD: Not sure if this is the right category to fit it.
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ0 -
Why google removed my landing pages from index?
I made new website meko.lv. I put many work to it, to make page SEO friendly, sprites, reduced requests added SSL, got google page speed insights score 100/100, but in 2. october all pages in google webmasters disappeared from index. Could you please look at website and say whats wrong with it? They are all search results present in google but for how long. it is so annoying, you put so many work but in result get high spam score. It is obvious that new pages can not get good links in one month https://meko.lv/ google webmasters google page speed score: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fmeko.lv%2F&tab=mobile q1LDHTn
Technical SEO | | Mekounko0 -
Should I change or redirect this URL?
Happy Friday everyone! I just noticed that one of our Attorney Profile's url's is wrong. We used to have someone named "Dana Fortugno" as our Family Law attorney, but when he left, (over two years ago) we hired "Scott Finelli." The person who setup the site, just changed the information on the page not url. So instead of it saying "http://www.kempruge.com/scott-finelli-jd-llm/;" it says "http://www.kempruge.com/dana-fortugno-jd-llm/." I'm considering taking all the content on the page with the wrong url, copying it to a new page with the correct URL and 301 redirecting (what would now be a blank page) to the new page with the correct URL. Is this the best way to handle this? Also, I don't believe there are many SEO concerns regarding the pages specifically. The profile pages aren't what we rank for in any of our Family Law related keywords. I am worried about having a completely blank page that just 301 redirects as looking bad to google, but not sure if it would? As always, thank you for your time and any assistance you can provide. Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
URL Changes And Site Map Redirects
We are working on a site redesign which will change/shorten our url structure. The primary domain will remain the same however most of the other urls on the site are getting much simpler. My question is how should this be best handled when it comes to sitemaps because there are massive amounts of URLS that will be redirected to the new shorter URL how should we best handle our sitemaps? Should a new sitemap be submitted right at launch? and the old sitemap removed later. I know that Google does not like having redirects in sitemaps. Has anyone done this on a large scale, 60k URLs or more and have any advice?
Technical SEO | | RMATVMC0 -
My Old Domain is Not Changing in Google
I have taken over the following domain www.choice-cottages.co.uk, part of the contract was to re-direct the old site www.choicecottages.info to the new site. Unfortunately I am only a middle man in the arrangement as the website is hosted with another company. The switch was done well over 4 weeks ago, the re-direct itself is working fine. However if you google choice cottages you will see the first listing is www.choicecottages.info, then I have my new site below for a few listings. Google is definitely updating something as before the old domain had lots of site links but this has reduced to a few. Does anyone know anything on this, as in the past it only takes a couple of days to update. Many thanks Andy
Technical SEO | | iprosoftware0 -
How much of a hit to changing urls?
Hi, We have a few pages that from an SEO perspective have poor URLs. We are planning on changing them (and 301 redirecting) the old page to the new page. I heard in the past, this can temporarily negatively impact your SERP rank etc. Since the old URLs are bad, even if there is a temporary negative hit, changing them in the long run it is better, but curious if anyone has any experience on what to expect.
Technical SEO | | NicB10 -
Do any short url's pass link juice? googles own? twitters?
I've read a few posts saying not shorten links at all but we have a lot to tweet and need to. Is googles shortener the best option? I've considered linking to the category index page the article is on and expect the user to find the article and click on the article, I don't like the experience that creates though. I've considered making the article permalink tiny but I would lose the page title being in the url. Is this the best option?
Technical SEO | | Aviawest0 -
Destination URL in SERPs keeps changing and I can't work out why.. Help.
I am befuddled as to why our destination URL in SERPs keeps changing oak furniture was nicely returning http://www.thefurnituremarket.co.uk/oakfurniture.asp then I changed something yesterday I did 2 things. published a link to that on facebook as part of a competition. redirected dynamic pages to the static URL for oak furniture.. Now for oak furniture the SERPs in GG UK is returning our home page as the most relevant landing page.. Any Idea why? I'm leaning to an onpage issue than posting on FB.. Thoughts?
Technical SEO | | robertrRSwalters0