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
-
Help: domain name change and Google News
Hi. I work for a regional news source, and our (separate) Spanish-language news publication recently changed its domain name. The publication lost its Google News inclusion. Most of their traffic came from Google News, so traffic tanked. They're trying to get back in. They reapplied but didn't get approved. They're now in the 30-day waiting period to reapply again. The website is run by a third-party company, which handled the domain name change in April (2015). That company has been running their site for a couple of years. Our in-house devs' hands are tied on helping, because we (at the mother company) don't manage their site. This third party has not been responsive. The Spanish pub folks have reached out to me to help them prepare for Round 2 of reapplication. I'm the mothership in-house SEO, but I've never experienced this situation before. Because everything seems to be in order besides the ham-handed changes, my best advice to them so far is: You'll have to wait until Google gets to know you again, unfortunately. Does that sound right? Any pointers out there for bringing their best possible A-game to the next round?
Technical SEO | | christyrobinson1 -
Which URL structure is better?
Quick question - Have a real estate site focused on "apartments", but apartments in not part of my company name. That being said, should which of the following URL structures should I use? http://website.com/city/neighborhood/property-name OR http://website.com/city-apartments/neighborhood/property-name
Technical SEO | | ChaseH0 -
Changing a domain name, pages redirection
when changing a domain name, should we redirect all the pages to their new pages or only the indexed pages? Thanks
Technical SEO | | bigrat950 -
Wrong Title In SERP
Hi, When i search for specific keyword that i rank in Google, my title page is completely different from what i see on actual page, but when i search for my other keyword that i rank too, i can see exact same title that i have on my page for the same URL, I'm using Thesis theme to manage my meta tags, How can i change that Title, my CTR dropped dramatically for the past week since it happened Thanks
Technical SEO | | KentR0 -
Changed URL of all web pages to a new updated one - Keywords still pick the old URL
A month ago we updated our website and with that we created new URLs for each page. Under "On-Page", the keywords we put to check ranking on are still giving information on the old urls of our websites. Slowly, some new URLs are popping up. I'm wondering if there's a way I can manually make the keywords feedback information from the new urls.
Technical SEO | | Champions0 -
Friendly URLs
Hi, I have an important news site and I am trying to implement user friendly URLs. Now, when you click a news in the homepage, it goes to a redirect.php page and then goes to a friendly url. the question is, It is better to have the friendly URL in the first link or it is the same for the robot having this in the finally url? Thanks
Technical SEO | | informatica8100 -
Compare URLs with 302 redirects
Hello I have a store which was developed in Magento. I have about 8300 errors like this: URL: http://www.theprinterdepo.com/catalog/product_compare/add/product/100/uenc/aHR0cDovL3d3dy50aGVwcmludGVyZGVwby5jb20vcHJpbnRlci1wYXJ0cy5odG1sP3A9NA,,/ 1 Warning 302 (Temporary Redirect) Found 3 days ago <dl> <dt>Redirects to</dt> <dt>http://goo.gl/XMaZg</dt> <dd>Description</dd> <dd>Using a 302 redirect will cause search engine crawlers to treat the redirect as temporary and not pass any link juice (ranking power). We highly recommend that you replace 302 redirects with 301 redirects.</dd> </dl> <a class="more expanded">Minimize</a> These URLs, are generated by magento by the COMPARE feature. In my store we bought an extension called SEO Enterprise Suite and I asked the developers(www.mageworx) about this error. Their answer is: Sorry for the late reply. Our extension adds NOINDEX,FOLLOW tag to compare and cookies pages so that they won't be indexed. I do not think that these redirects can hurt your SEO because these pages won't be indexed at all. The question is: What should I do? Is there anyway that SEOMOZ ignores these URLs? What should I do next, I just dont like to have that HIGH number of errors and warnings. Thank you
Technical SEO | | levalencia10 -
URL Structure Question
Hey folks, I have a weird problem and currently no idea how to fix it. We have a lot of pages showing up as duplicates although they are the same page, the only difference is the url structure. They seem to show up like: http://www.example.com/page/ and http://www.example.com/page What would I need to do to force the URLs into one format or the other to avoid having that one page counting as two? The same issue pops up with upper and lower case: http://www.example.com/Page and http://www.example.com/page Is there any solution to this or would I need to forward them with 301s or similar? Thanks, Mike
Technical SEO | | Malarowski0