Should i change the url name for serp plural from singular to plural please advise
-
Hi,
I have an established ecommerce site online since 2008 when I set it up I did not really think about it and i called it mywidget. However the traffic is minimum 10 times higher for plural and all the long tails ie bluewidgets, cheapwidgets are all plural.
I rank very well on the widget but not widgets - I know there is more competition but still it would be best to have the most commonly used phrases in the url.
Now I have registered mywidgets should i transfer my shop to mywidgets and setup a permanen redirect 301 for all the products url and categories.
I'm guessing I will be negatively impacted in the short term but in the long term it should be worth it. Would you agree sorry its a massive decision for me and any help would be much appreciated.
Many thanks
-
Hi Devin,
many thanks for your reply. It does very much sense of what you are saying and you are right most competitors don't even have widgets in title. Good example Google is google not best search results.com
I think I might go for it because it will bug me for years if I dont change it because all the long tails is all plural...ie cheap blue widgets rather then blue widget....
Is there an alternative to 301 what I planned to do is redirect each product to the new product so done correctly or is there a better way..
Many thanks again
-
Chances are, from a purely SEO point of view, it would be more beneficial to have your site on mywidgets than on mywidget.
Whether or not its worth it financially will depend on how big a boost you get out of changing the url, and this will primarily depend on the competitiveness of the new keywords you are targeting.
If you do a quick google on "website widgets" or "free widgets", you'll see that the top few sites don't actually have 'widgets' in their domain name, it's 'widget'. This is probably because they're incredibly competitive search terms and those websites are simply far more authoritative than their 'widgets' competitors. The lack of an 's' in their names verges on insignificant in comparison to their massive backlink profiles which have been necessary to put them at the top of the SERP.
Including the 's' is likely to help, but don't count on it doing the job all on its own.
The worst thing that could happen is you go through all the trouble of moving and find that it hasn't made enough of a difference to justify the loss of traffic while moving. With this in mind, if I was in your shoes I would start by experimenting with Meta Titles and on-page copy on a few of my pages to see what difference that makes, before moving the entire domain - temporarily 301'ing mywidgets into mywidget.
One last thing to consider is that a 301 does not pass all the link juice from one domain to another. It's estimated that you tend to lose about 10% of the 'juice' in the redirect. Redirecting from mywidget to mywidgets will result in a more relevant, but less authoritative website.
Hope that helps
Devin
-
thanks for taking the time to reply. All my links are plural after six months I found the error in my thinking...I just think if its a redirect so widget-a redirects widgets-a in the long term it will be better. Thanks again for your reply.
-
I wouldn't change a URL simply to make it plural. You'll lose some SEO momentum in changing. Change your copy and links to use plural and I bet you can find you still rank well.
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
-
Blog not ranking for my name
Hi everyone. I'm new here so apologies if I'm not asking an appropriate question - just let me know! Can anyone help me figure out why my blog (https://www.jamescrowley.net/) isn't ranking at all for my name? I've run it through the standard Moz audit tools and it hasn't picked up any major issues. It ranks fine for my name plus " CTO", but doesn't appear anywhere in the top 50 without that qualifier. I realise there are many other 'James Crowley's to compete with but weirdly even my GitHub profile page appears to rank higher (https://github.com/jamescrowley) I moved the domain a while back (18 months+) and I used to rank highly, but it never seems to have recovered (all the standard redirects are in place, and told Google at the time about the move). Any suggestions would be very much appreciated!
Technical SEO | | james.crowley0 -
Redirects Advice Please
Hi All, I have been approached by someone to look at their website who has seen a rank drop over the last week of around 15 places. On a quick look at their website I have seen what I am imaging could be the culprit as I imagine it will be creating a re-direct loop. However, i am not 100% with these things so would like some others opinions.com They have a wordpress website. There home page lets say https://theirsite.com/ They have an internal page built for a search term https://www.theirsite.com/keyword In wordpress they have set that page in settings to be the homepage. However, I looked on their server and via htaccess they have a 301 redirect from https://www.theirsite.com/keyword to https://www.theirsite.com/ So the questions are: 1. Could this be creating a loop? 2. The redirect was placed around a week before the rank drop. Could this possibly be the cause of the drop? 3. I am assuming that removing the 301 from htaccess is recommended? Thanks in advance for any advice
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Adding a parameter to the URL / URL Stracture
Dear Community, I would like to ask a question regarding url structure. We are struggling with shorting urls and we thought to add a "parameter" to the url. Example: domain.com/product**/a/** or domain.com**/a/**product/ Current url structure: domain.com/product/ So we go after and short url contains "/a/" and find the category we want. Is this going to harm our SEO strategies? Any idea is welcome.
Technical SEO | | geofil0 -
Canonical URL Change
Hi, I have a Product Page, say www.example.com/product-title/.
Technical SEO | | viatrading1
Canonical URL is www.example.com/product-title/ I want to change its URL to www.example.com/product-title-2/
Canonical URL is www.example.com/product-title-2/
Can't do 301 Redirect. Is SEO Juice passed from www.example.com/product-title/ to www.example.com/product-title-2/ ? Thanks,0 -
Exclude URL Parameters?
Hello, I am new in SEO and I am trying to understand the basics in URL parameters. Let’s assume that I have an ecommerce site with Categories (Category1, Category2) Views (listview=1, listview=2) Orders (OrderBy=1, OrderBy=2) Pages (pg=1, pg=2) Why should I add google to index pages with different views and Listing orders? What is the benefit for the site to have the same content with different order? I am not sure but maybe only need pages in order to google to “travel” between the pages? For example: www.mydomain.com/books/pg=1 www.mydomain.com/books/?order=date www.mydomain.com/books/?listview =1 The products in pages (pg) will always include products in order and listview? Why should google index again the content? Furthermore, from the last time that google index the pg=1 the products has changed. Thank you in advanced
Technical SEO | | ArisGast0 -
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 -
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 -
Should I change a 301 redirect?
I recently moved all the content from an old site to a new site on a new domain. I lost a significant amount of traffic as a result. There are 301 redirects for every page on the old site. Generally, these point to the same content as was on the relevant page of the old site. However, the 301 redirect for the homepage on the old site points to the homepage on the new site, not to the content from the old site homepage. I'm wondering whether to change the 301 to point at the content from the old site homepage. Any advice would be much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | seqal0