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
-
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 -
URL Format
Often we have web platforms that have a default URL structure that looks something like this www.widgetcompany.co.uk/widget-gallery/coloured-widgets/red-widgets This format is quite well structured but would it just be more effective to be www.widgetcompany.co.uk/red-widgets? I realise that it may depend on a lot of factors but generally is it better to have the shorter URL if targeting the key phrase "red widgets" One thing, it certainly looks a bit keyword stuffy with all those "widgets"
Technical SEO | | vital_hike0 -
Domain change recommendations
We recently migrated one of our websites to a new domain. Obviously we were expecting a decrease in traffic initially, but it has actually gone down by 70% week-over-week since we made the switch. We set up a 301 redirect from the old domain to the new domain, changed all internal links to the new domain and changed all inbound links that we owned to the new domain. Our research suggested the best way to approach a domain change was by keeping it simple and not making too many changes at once. So my questions are: 1. Are these the kinds of results we should expect initially after a domain change? And if not, 2. What are the steps we should take from here? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | gouldtr0 -
Structure of urls
**Hallo from Athens, Greece. We have to implement the following project and i need your help: ** We will build a company guide for the whole country and company local guides for each city for the same client. **Information of the country guide is the sum of information of local guides, so when a user is at the country guide he sees information from companies from all cities and when the user is at city guide he sees info only for the city. ** The problem is the structure of the url we should have. Should the page of presentation of each company should have structure as domain.gr/id/company? or city.domain.gr/id/company and the one to be canonical to the other? is this good for seo? Should both urls be included in the sitemap? Thank you
Technical SEO | | herculesopa0 -
Are you allowed to point different urls to same page
hi, i have some urls that i am either going to put on hold or thinking about pointing to one of my sites. what it is, i am looking at re-designing the pages but not until next year, so i thought i would point some of the urls to a site that i am happy with to different pages, but not sure if i am allowed this or not so for example, if i have a site on cars, and one of the url is www.rovercars.co.uk i was thinking about pointing it to the page that is about rover cars. can anyone let me know if this is allowed or not please
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Is it worth changing our blog post URL's?
We're considering changing the URL's for our blog posts and dropping the date information. Ex. http://spreecommerce.com/blog/2012/07/27/spree-1-1-3-released/ changes to http://spreecommerce.com/blog/spree-1-1-3-released/ Based on what I've learned here the new URL is better for SEO but since these pages already exist do we risk a minor loss of Google juice with 301 redirects? We have a sitemap for the blog posts so I imagine this wouldn't be too hard for Google to learn the new ones.
Technical SEO | | schof0 -
Dynamic URLs via Refinements
What is the best way to handle large product pages with many different refinement possibilities. Ex. hard drive - 40 gigs - black case etc. All of these refinements add to the length of the url and potentially create crawling issues as the url is to dynamic. I have seen people canonical all refinements and pages to the main cat page, I have seen others no follow certain refinements. Also in the SEOmoz crawling report it tells me that over two parameters is bad. What is the best way to handle this? Thanks
Technical SEO | | Gordian0 -
Duplicate canonical URLs in WordPress
Hi everyone, I'm driving myself insane trying to figure this one out and am hoping someone has more technical chops than I do. Here's the situation... I'm getting duplicate canonical tags on my pages and posts, one is inside of the WordPress SEO (plugin) commented section, and the other is elsewhere in the header. I am running the latest version of WordPress 3.1.3 and the Genesis framework. After doing some testing and adding the following filters to my functions.php: <code>remove_action('wp_head', 'genesis_canonical'); remove_action('wp_head', 'rel_canonical');</code> ... what I get is this: With the plugin active + NO "remove action" - duplicate canonical tags
Technical SEO | | robertdempsey
With the plugin disabled + NO "remove action" - a single canonical tag
With the plugin disabled + A "remove action" - no canonical tag I have tried using only one of these remove_actions at a time, and then combining them both. Regardless, as long as I have the plugin active I get duplicate canonical tags. Is this a bug in the plugin, perhaps somehow enabling the canonical functionality of WordPress? Thanks for your help everyone. Robert Dempsey0