What is the best practice for changing a url of an existing page
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I a looking through the on-page SEO reports in SEOmoz for one of my sites. It suggests that I change the url of a particular page to match the desired search term I want to rank for. In this case it is a site for a local business and the url is example.com/testimonials. when it probabaly should have instead been example.com/city-business-reviews.
I have just a couple links to this page and I'm stuck towards the bottom of page 1 in the SERPs currently. Questions...
1. Should I change the url to include the exact keyword term I want the page to rank for?
2. If yes, what is the best method to ensure that any existing link juice to the current url is retained? Would I change the url, then create a new page with the old url and apply a 301 redirect to point it to the new page?
Thanks!
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Thanks Roger and Dave. I appreciate the responses.
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Best practices is using the 301 redirect method - permanent
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html#redirect
You can also contact the link webmaster/s if possible to let them know that the page has changed url.
For added stability and to let Google know you should rebuild your sitemap to reflect the change as well.
In addition run Xenu or Screaming Frog to find all your internal linking locations to avoid missing the buried internal links.
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1. It's no guarantee but it's a good place to start. I would reccomend it as a best practice.
2. You could either change the name and 301 redirect the old page to the new one and 9x% of the link juice will pass. The other option is to leave both versions up and add a rel canonical tag to both pages. You would want to have the same tag on both pages referencing your preferred version. If you dont mind having 2 versions I would go with canonical, but you will have to remember to update content of multiple pages which could be problematic on a large scale if not using a content management system. Either solution is acceptable though.
Update - Also remember to update any internal/nav links you may have and any external links that you have any control over.
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