URLs: To Change or Not to Change
-
Hello,
We recently launched a redesigned site in Drupal in December of last year. We are an eco-travel company. My current URL's look like this:
/africa-and-middle-east/kenya-tanzania
/central-south-america/galapagos-islands
My pages have good term targeting grades, and the rankings for the terms we are targeting - "kenya and tanzania safaris" and "galapagos islands cruises" are decent, but not great - most are on page 2 or 3. The one URL where I targeted our most important term, "amazon river cruises," I am still on page 2.
/central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises
My questions are:
- Did I miss an opportunity with the rest of the URL's, and should I consider changing the rest to more targeted terms with 301s? Since the new site launched in January, perhaps I have not given enough time for my new URL's to index and mature. Would it be easier to set up landing pages with unique article content that targets terms such as "galapagos islands cruises" and "kenya and tanzania safaris"? If so, how can I do it in such a way as to not "compete" with the pages I want to drive them to?
This also raises the question of redirecting the same URL twice i.e. I would have 2 redirects in place for the same url e.g. from the former site to the new site, and yet another redirect to the most-recent URL. Is that a problem?
Sorry if I've asked too many questions in one post.
Any advice appreciated.
-
Have you looked at how the pages are externally linked to by other sites? Compare that to who does rank on page one and you might find some opportunities. IMHO, 301ing a url is really throwing in the towel.
-
Hi! I'm following up on older questions that are still marked unanswered. Are you still looking for an answer, or have you gone ahead and implemented (or deciding against implementing) the url changes? Do you have any lessons learned you can share?
Thanks!
-
Damien,
Thanks very much for your input. I have been doing a lot of reading on content siloing, and my question (FINAL is, how similar or dissimilar should the URLs and on-page SEO on the landing pages be from the product pages? For instance, if I'm targeting "amazon river cruises" and "galapagos islands cruises" on the product pages, should I consciously seek to use variations for the landing pages, such as "amazon river tours" and "galapagos islands tours"?
Best,
Carlton
-
Commerce pages must still rank and therefore will still need to be optimised whichn will include unique content. Pointing from the blog content to the e-com page is good but don't use the same anchor text and URL throughout the site. Spice it up a bit
-
Dan, Damien:
Thanks for your answers - they were very helpful in being "forced to consider" this issue. I'm basically planning on paying a service to generate 125+ articles for me over 4 months, and was trying to decide on the most beneficial way to house them. The service recommended building landing pages aimed at each of those terms, but we don't want content pages outranking commerce pages - sales are what it's all about, at the end of the day!! That said, what would be your recommendation?
My thinking was to publish them under the blog under the most relevant categories, then push to the authority pages via anchor-text links.
-
The more times you redirect a URL, in my opinion, the more value you lose. The URLs above look fine. Don't forget your URL isn't the only ranking factor. Are all your on-page elements as good as they can be? Does the content on the page fit with what the URL is telling us?
DD
#edit - Agree with above post - double-posted!
-
Never do a double 301 redirect. Google hates that. Every redirect should point one URL to it's new location.
Don't make landing pages to target specific phrases if they aren't the page you want to drive the traffic to. Honestly, the keywords in your URL means about as much as a drop of water in the ocean. Just adding keywords to your URL is not going to get you from page 2 or 3 to page 1.
The important thing to do is keep a consistent URL structure throughout the website. As long as you are doing that you're in good shape. Also, I would make sure the directories one level up from your final url's are all pages as well. By that I mean /central-south-america should be a real page of content if it is part of the url for /central-south-america/amazon-river-cruises.
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
-
Broken URL Links
Hi everyone, I have a question regarding broken URL links on my website. Late last year I move my site from an old platform to Shopify, and now have broken URL links giving out 4xx errors. When I look at Moz Pro>Campaigns>Insights>links, I can see the top broken URL links, however there is a difference if copy & paste URL directly from Moz Pro and by Export CSV file. For example below, If I copy and paste links direct from Moz Pro, it has the “http://” in front as below: http://www.thehairhub.com.au/WebRoot/ecshared01/Shops/thehairhub/57F3/1D8F/D244/C675/E27D/AC10/003F/35AD/manic-panic-colours.jpg But when I export the list of links as an CSV file, the http:// is removed. www.thehairhub.com.au/WebRoot/ecshared01/Shops/thehairhub/57F3/1D8F/D244/C675/E27D/AC10/003F/35AD/manic-panic-colours.jpg Another Example below: By copy & paste URL direct from Moz Pro
Technical SEO | | johnwall
http://thehairhub.com.au/Shop-Brands/Vitafive-CPR/CPR-Rescue By export CSV file.
thehairhub.com.au/Shop-Brands/Vitafive-CPR/CPR-Rescue Which one do I use to enter into the “Redirect From” field in Shopify URL Redirects? Do I need to have the http:// in front of the URL? Or is it not required for redirects to work? Kind Regards, John Wall
The Hair Hub0 -
Big SEO Changes
Firstly, this is quite extensive so thank you to anyone who answers some or all of the below! So this is quite a lengthy ordeal, and I'm going to start by saying that I'm no SEO expert (yet). I've paid for SEO for years and only on the odd occasion has it made any real difference. It has come to the point now where I've spent so much money on SEO over the years with practically no benefit that I can't afford to do it anymore, so I am teaching myself. So, back in July my website was hacked for a total sum of three weeks. My SEO/Hosting company at the time didn't do anything about it, let the hack sit there and didn't even take the site offline. It just so happened that at the time I was changing over to a new site at the time anyway, so I launched the new site (completely different in structure to the old one), did all of the relevant 301 redirects, and my traffic hasn't recovered since. I have gone from around 100-150 daily visits to 0-10. The descriptions, keywords, alt image tags, h1 & 2, meta data, etc. is all much better (a lot of it was empty on the previous site) on the new site than it was on the previous site so I was assuming it would be better, but it isn't. Anyone got any suggestions as to why this might be? Here are some specific questions: Canonical Problem? My site is ecommerce and lists some products in several categories, that has resulted in a high duplicate content rate. Is it expected/accepted by google that this would be the case for an ecommerce website or do I need to sort out some serious canonical urls to fix the issue? The site structure of my website could also be a problem, but I'm not qualified enough to know for sure. If you view a product/sub-category, then remove the category section of that link, the product will still appear. I don't know if this structure is good or not? i.e. if you click both links below, the link will appear all the same. http://thespacecollective.com/space-clothing/nasa-and-space-t-shirts http://thespacecollective.com/nasa-and-space-t-shirts Is this a problem for SEO? Duplicate Product Tag Problem? I have many duplicate product tags appearing on many products, should these be blocked in the robots.txt? i.e. http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown-cm-meteorite-acrylic http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/space-flown/apollo-11-flown Site Code Structure When choosing the template I would use for my website I did not stop to consider if the code was SEO friendly, this on my part was due to my ignorance on the subject. Is the site structure SEO-friendly or is it hindering my efforts? Website: http://thespacecollective.com Again, thank you to anyone who takes the time to read/care about the issues facing a newbie. My only option now is to learn SEO myself (which is well overdue), so any advice/answers are appreciated!
Technical SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Domain Change -- Drop in Rank
So I had a client that recently decided to change their URL to make it more "searchable"/shorter. Since doing so, I have noticed a significant drop in rankings for a number of the keyword terms we were previously ranking for. Is there a way to push the links to the new URL or is the only solution to revert back to the old URL?
Technical SEO | | maxcarnage0 -
Parked former company's url on top of my existing url and that URL is showing in SERPs for my top keywords
I have the URL from my former company parked on top of my existing URL. My top keywords are showing up with the old URL attached to the metadsecription of my existing URL. It was supposed to be 301 redirected instead of parked but my web developer insists this was the right way to do it and it will work itself out after google indexes the old URL out of existence. Are there any other options?
Technical SEO | | Joelabarre0 -
Should I change my targeted page?
Currently I have a site where the targeted keywords were on the home page, with links built to the homepage. It has been widely recognised though that Google is looking more and more for specific content on webpages that holds greater relevance to search queries. As such, I switched this targeted page to other created webpages - changing metatags and creating more relevant content for respective keywords. I thought this would improve rankings, however, upon doing this there was a sharp fall in rankings for keywords. Is there anything that I could have done wrong, or can do better so that keywords move back up the rankings?
Technical SEO | | Gavo0 -
Google Places Page Changes
We had a client(dentist) hire another marketing firm(without our knowledge) and due to some Google page changes they made, their website lost a #1 ranking, was disassociated with the places page and was placed at result #10 below all the local results. We quickly made some changes and were able to bring them up to #2 within a few days and restore their Google page after about a week, but the tracking/forwarding phone number the marketing company was using shows up on the page despite attempts to contact Google through updating the business in places management as well as submit the phone number as incorrect while providing the correct phone number. And because the client fired that marketing company, the phone number will no longer be active in a few days. Of course this is very important for a dental office. Has anyone else had problems with the speed and updating Google Places/Plus pages for businesses? What's the most efficient way to make changes like this?
Technical SEO | | tvinson0 -
URL with tracking code
Hi there, At the company i am currently working for we have a problem with shortcut url with tracking in it. They send a lot of brochures with a shortcut URL which redirects to the page of the event with tagging. For example The real URL is:
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen
http://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/ The URL in the brochure is:
www.sbo.nl/schoolleiderpo this then redirects to: h
ttp://www.sbo.nl/cursussen/schoolleider-primair-onderwijs/?utm_source=direct&utm_medium=shortcut&utm_campaign=schoolleiderpo Now we can measure the effect of the brochure on on-line traffic and conversion. This is great but a lot of website link to that shortcut url and if the event is put offline the links to it generate an 404. We have now about 800 backlinks that generate this 404 and i want to fix it. Another big problem "i think" is the possibility that google will index this url with tagging. Now i have 2 options: 1. look at al the url with that 404 and redirect them with a 301 to the best page 2. create the shortcut on an page that is most suitable but then i will get the tagging in the URL and i guess google will see this as dublicate content. It is possible that in the future the shortcut url will be used again. What would you suggest as the best sollution.0 -
Php to html - change in extension
Hello, What is the code to redirect all the pages of a site from .php to .html extension? Thanks
Technical SEO | | seoug_20051