Changing all urls
-
A client of mine has a wordpress website that is installed in a directory, called "site".
So when you go to www.domain.com you are redirected to www.domain.com/site.
We all know how bad it is to have a redirect fron your subdomain to another page. In this case I measured a loss of 5 points of page authority.
The question is: what is the best practice to remove the "site" from the address and changing all the urls?
- Should I use the webmaster tool to tell to Google that the site is moving? It's not 100% true, cause the site is just moving one level up.
- Should I install a copy of the website under www.domain.com and just redirect 301 every old page to its new url? This way I think the site would be deindexet for 2/3 months.
Any suggestions or tips welcome!
Thanks DoMiSol
-
A pleasure! In answer to your questions:
- there is a slight risk of a temporary blip, but assuming you do everything correctly at the same time, the transfer should be seamless and any ranking changes minimal and very temporary.
- Not as far as I know. Changing the permalink structure doesn't cause 301-redirects to be put in place so you will need to do that separately. You could do that in the htaccess file or you could use a plug-in. We like to use John Godley's Redirection Plug-In or there is another here.
Best of luck.
-
Thank you Nick.
I have 2 more questions:
-
Do you think that doing this I risk any ranking drop? If so, how big and for how long?
-
Will Wordpress internal links work just the same? I mean should I only strip the "site" from the Wordpress URL in the General Settings of Wordpress?
Thank you again,
DoMiSol
-
-
I believe you will be best to do two things:
- put in place a global 301 rule to redirect any URL with /site/ in it to the same without /site/. If the site is hosted on Apache this is relatively easy to do in htaccess if you get your commands right. You can destroy a site if you're not careful though...so take care. If you don't know htaccess find someone close by who does!
- re-configure the root directory of the domain on the server to point at the sub-directory directly. Using e.g. Plesk and command line this is pretty trivial to do. This will have the effect of the server retrieving content directly from the sub-directory...if you set it up correctly it will be as if /site/ doesn't exist.
You will need to do these both at the same time, and assuming you get it all right there shouldn't be any interruption in service, although there will be a period when a mixture of /site/ and non-/site/ URLs are indexed.
Installing another copy of the site is fraught with risk as you could end up with a serious duplicate content problem, ranking drops etc....far simpler to reconfigure the server and domain.
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
-
Technical URL SEO question
Hi All, We sell a product on our site which is displayed in cubic metres, from an SEO perspective is it ok to have /3m³ in the URL or should I use 3m3. Thanks All
Technical SEO | | Redooo0 -
URL Parameters as pagination
Hi guys, due to some changes to our category pages our paginated urls will change so they will look like this: ...category/bagger/2?q=Bagger&startDate=26.06.2017&endDate=27.06.2017 You see they include a query parameter as well as a start and end date which will change daily. All URLs with pagination are on noindex/follow. I am worrying that the products which are linked from the category pages will not get crawled well when the URLs on which they are linked from change on a daily basis. Do you have some experience with this? Are there other things we need to worry about with these pagination URLs? cheers
Technical SEO | | JKMarketing0 -
Canonical URL on frontpage
I have a site where the CMS system have added a canonical URL on my frontpage, pointing to a subpage on my site. Something like on my domain root.Google is still showing MyDomain.com as the result in the search engines which is good, but can't this approach hurt my ranking? I mean it's basically telling google that my frontpage content is located far down the hierarki, instead of my domain root, which of course have the most authority.
Technical SEO | | EdmondHong87
Something seems to indicate that this could very well be the case, as we lost several placements after moving to this new CMS system a few months ago.0 -
OSE says URL redirects to URL with trailing slash but it doesn't.
Site is www.example.com/folder/us and OSE says this URL redirects to www.example.com/folder/us/, but it does not. When I look at the OSE report for the latter version with the "/" it says "No Data Available For This URL". Why would that be? The original URL is www.example.com and it redirects to www.example.com/folder/us. Is this anything I need to worry about? I thought that the trailing / doesn't really mean much anymore but nonetheless, why does it think it redirects there?
Technical SEO | | rock220 -
Approved Word Separators in URLs
Hi There, We are in the process of revamping our URL structure and my devs tell me they have a technical problem using a hyphen as a word separator. There's a whole lot of competing recommendations out there and at this point I'm just confused. Does anyone have any idea what character would be next-best to the hyphen for separating words in a URL? Any reason to prefer one over another? Some links I've found discussing the topic: This page says that "__Google has confirmed that the point (.), the comma (,) and the hyphen (-) are valid word separators in URL’s.": http://www.internetofficer.com/seo/google-word-separator/ This page suggests the plus (+) symbol would be best: http://labs.phurix.net/posts/word-separators-in-urls This guy says he's tested and there's a whole bunch of symbols that will work as word separators: http://www.webproguide.com/articles/Symbols-as-word-separators-a-look-inside-the-search-engine-logic/ I'm leaning towards the tilde (~) or the plus (+) sign. Usage would be like so: http://www.domain.com/shop/sterling~silver OR /shop/sterling+silver etc... Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | Richline_Digital1 -
Changing .html to .asp in URLs
Hi Mozzers, I have a question. The webmaster of a client of mine needs to make changes to some files which will effect the URL's. Essentially everything is staying the same but the end of the URL will change from .html to .asp. This is because the site will be dynamically loading content (perhaps from a database) (i.e. latest news to come from their blog etc..) In order to do this we would need to change the filenames of the whole website. (i.e. personnel.html would become personel.asp). Changing URLs can harm indexation but a small change to the end - would Google drop these pages? A 301 redirect is not possible from old URL to new. What impact would this have on Rankings? Thanks Gareth
Technical SEO | | Bush_JSM0 -
Keyword and URL
I have a client who has a popular name (like 'Joe Smith'). His blog URL has only his first name and the name of his company in it, like joe.company.com. His blog doesn't rank well at all in the first 3-4 Google SERPs. I was thinking of advising him to change the URL of his blog to joesmith.company.com, and having his webmaster do 301 redirects from the old URL to the new one. Do you think this is a good strategy, or would you recommend something else? I realize ranking isn't just about the URL, it's about links, etc. But I think making his URL more specific to his name could help. Any advice greatly appreciated! Jim
Technical SEO | | JamesAMartin0 -
URL rewriting from subcategory to category
Hello everybody! I have quite simple question about URL rewriting from subcategory to category, yet I can't find any solution to this problem (due to lack of my deeper apache programming knowledge). Here is my problem/question: we have two website url structures that causes dublicate problems: www.website.lt/language/category/ www.website.lt/language/category/1/ 1 and 2 pages are absolutely same (both also returns 200 OK). What we need is 301 redirect from 2 to 1 without any other deeper categories redirects (like www.website.com/language/category/1/169/ redirecting to .../category/1/ or .../category/). Here goes .htaccess URL rewrite rules: RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&par4=$6&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&par3=$5&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&par2=$4&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&par1=$3&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/([^/]+)/$ /index.php?lang=$1&idr=$2&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] RewriteRule ^([^/]{1,3})/$ /index.php?lang=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] There are other redirects that handles non-www to www and related issues: RedirectMatch 301 ^/lt/$ http://www.domain.lt/ RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain.lt RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.lt/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.domain.lt/$1/ [R=301,L] At this moment we cannot solve this problem with rel canonical (due to our CMS limits). Thanks for your help guys! If You need any other details on our coding, just let me know.
Technical SEO | | jkundrotas0
