Overly-Dynamic URLs & Changing URL Structure w Web Redesign
-
I have a client that has multiple apartment complexes in different states and metro areas. They get good traffic and pretty good conversions but the site needs a lot of updating, including the architecture, to implement SEO standards. Right now they rank for " <brand_name>apartments" on every place but not " <city_name>apartments".</city_name></brand_name>
There current architecture displays their URLs like:
- http://www.<client_apartments>.com/index.php?mainLevelCurrent=communities&communityID=28&secLevelCurrent=overview</client_apartments>
- http://www.<client_apartments>.com/index.php?mainLevelCurrent=communities&communityID=28&secLevelCurrent=floorplans&floorPlanID=121</client_apartments>
I know it is said to never change the URL structure but what about this site? I see this URL structure being bad for SEO, bad for users, and basically forces us to keep the current architecture.
They don't have many links built to their community pages so will creating a new URL structure and doing 301 redirects to the new URLs drastically drop rankings?
Is this something that we should bite the bullet on now for future rankings, traffic, and a better architecture?
-
I tend to subscribe to the 'don't change the page names' rule but sometimes, it just has to be done for the greater good. The trick her is to be absolutely fastidious in the approach to rewriting the old pages to new and try to make sure there are several benefits to the new page name and url structure.
You are not moving the domain so you are only possibly impacting page level metrics so I tend to feel that if you 301 and come up with a better structure for humans and a better architecture for search you will not have any major problems.
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
-
Is a Wordpress AMP plugin sufficient, or should we upgrade our WP theme to an AMP theme?
Hello there, our site is on a Flatsome Wordpress theme (which is responsive and does not support AMP), and we are currently using the AMP for Wordpress plugin on our blog and other content rich pages. My question is - is a plugin sufficient to make our pages AMP friendly? Or should we consider switching to a theme that is AMP enabled already? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tnixis
Katie0 -
How should you determine the preferred URL structure?
Hi Guys, When migrating to a new CMS which include new pages how should you determine the URL structure, specifically: So should we include www. or without it? Should the URL have a trailing slash? How would you determine the answer to these questions? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kayl870 -
Fetch & Render
Hi I've done Google fetch & render of this page & I have images which Google/customers aren't seeing - how do I identify the problems with this page? http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/chairs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey1 -
New blog post URLs due to WordPress permalink structure changes. Any SEO repercussions?
A client site had the follwing URLs for all blog posts: www.example.com/health-news/sample-post www.example.com/health-news is the top level page for the blog section. While making some theme changes during Google mobilegeddon, the permalink structure got changed to www.example.com/sample-post ("health-news" got dropped from all blog post URLs). Google has indexed the updated post structure and older URLs are getting redirected (if entered directly in the browser) to the new ones; it appears that WordPress takes care of that automatically as no 301 redirects were entered manually. It seems that there hasn't been any loss of rankings (however not 100% sure as the site ranks for well over 100 terms). Do you suggest changing the structure back to the old one? Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VishalRayMalik0 -
What was your experience with changing site url's?
I work with a company that is about to move to a new platform. Because the category and page structure is different every almost every url but the home page will need to be 301 redirected. I know how to do this and am pretty sure I will find and fix 99% ahead of time and not have too many 404's showing up in webmaster tools to clean up. My question is has anyone who is reading this post had to do this before and what was your experience with organic traffic after you made the switch. I am predicting that even if I successfully redirected 100% of the url's there would be some loss for a couple of months just due to the fact that we are making a major change. My bosses are asking if there will be any loss and I need to tell them what to expect.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KentH0 -
Are these URLs too Keyword-packed?
Hi guys, Here is the URL: http://www.consumerbase.com/mailing-lists/dog-stores-mailing-list.html The target keywords are "Dog stores mailing list" and "Dog stores mailing lists" Does having "mailing-list" and "mailing-lists" in my URL hurt me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W0 -
International URL Puzzle
Hello, I have 4 different URL's going to 4 different countries that all contain the same content and Google is seeing them as duplicate pages. For ecommerce reasons I have to have these 4 pages separated. Here is a example of the pages below so you can see the URL structure: www.example/com/canada www.example.com/australia www.example.com/usa www.example.com/UK How do I fix this duplicate content problem? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digitalops0 -
Search Engine Blocked by robots.txt for Dynamic URLs
Today, I was checking crawl diagnostics for my website. I found warning for search engine blocked by robots.txt I have added following syntax to robots.txt file for all dynamic URLs. Disallow: /*?osCsid Disallow: /*?q= Disallow: /*?dir= Disallow: /*?p= Disallow: /*?limit= Disallow: /*review-form Dynamic URLs are as follow. http://www.vistastores.com/bar-stools?dir=desc&order=position http://www.vistastores.com/bathroom-lighting?p=2 and many more... So, Why should it shows me warning for this? Does it really matter or any other solution for these kind of dynamic URLs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit0