Custom Permalinks (aka alias') - does it look spammy to googlebot?
-
I am moving my whole site over to wordpress (150+pgs). In the process I assigned pages to appropriate parent pages via "page attributes".
I was really excited about this. I like how it organizes everything in the pages dashboard. I also think that the sitemap that comes with my theme can create something really great for visitors with this info.
What I realized after doing that is that it changed my url to include the parent page. Basically, the url is now "domain.com/parent-page/child-page.html". This is rather disasterous because the url's of these newly created child pages on my old site are simple "domain.com/child-page". Not that they're defined as parent or child pages on my existing dreamweaver/html site... but you know what I mean - Right?!
I got a plugin called "Permalink Editor" to let me customize the url. So, I went through all of the child pages and got rid of the parent page in the url.
Then when I woke up this morning I realized that what I've created is a "permalink alias". That sounds a little bit scary to me. Perhaps like google could consider it spam and like I'm trying to "sculpt link flow".
I'm not... I'm just trying to recreate my site as it is in wordpress. I want the site to be exactly the same in terms of the url's. But, I want the many benefit's of wordpress' CMS.
Should I go an unassign all of the parent/child pages in the "Page Attributes". Or, am I being paranoid and should I leave it as is?
fyi - this is the first page that came up with I searched for permalink alias. It looks kind of black-hatty to me?!
- http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/wordpress-seo/seo-ultimate-4-7/Thanks so much. I look forward to a response!
-
Hi There
Here's what I would do;
1. Set up the new WordPress site exactly how you want it to appear. Use the best URL structure that makes sense - don't worry about what it was on the old site. In most cases, the way WordPress does it with parent pages is totally fine.
2. In excel - make a column all the pages on your old web site - you can use Screaming Frog to crawl the site and do this. Then, in the next column, match the old pages with the corresponding new pages from the WordPress site. The URLs are going to be different but that's ok.
3. Last step - when you make the new WordPress site live, you just need to 301 redirect the old URLs from Dreamweaver to the new one for WordPress. A 301 redirect is something that directs users to the new updated page. You can do a 301 redirect with the Redirection plugin for wordpress.
What you end up with, is a new site with new URLs for each page - but the old pages get redirected to the correct new ones.
Hopefully that makes sense? And very sorry this question was not picked up sooner!
-Dan
-
Anyone??
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
-
Hreflang Tags - error: 'en' - no return tags
Hello, We have recently implemented Hreflang tags to improve the findability of our content in each specific language. However, Webmaster tool is giving us this error... Does anyone know what it means and how to solve it? Here I attach a screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/a4AsqLNtF6J Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
If I sell custom sticker products and have similar titles, is it a problem?
Hi, We're running a rather new website at www.redrockdecals.com and we sell mainly sticker products. I would just like to clarify on something that is bugging me and I just can't go forward with other products until I know the answers. I'd appreciate the help so much. We sell for example license plate products for different European countries. I have figured out the best title for the page would be for example "Custom Catalonia License Plate" and the primary keyword in this is Catalonia license plate since that's what actually gets some searches from Google and therefore I have used that without the word "custom" in the product description text. I guess it's a good idea to write totally different description texts for all of these license plate pages so that's what I've been doing. Now the question is - does google accept the fact that I have different product titles like Custom Catalonia License Plate, Custom Germany License Plate etc so just the country name differs on all of these pages? Or should I play around with the titles and word orders also? There is one part on the product page where we describe for example the temperature ranges and other specifications about the sticker material as you can see here: http://www.redrockdecals.com/custom-slovakia-license-plate Is it ok to copy-paste that text to all of the pages if the short descriptions on top of the product page are different?
Technical SEO | | speedbird12290 -
Weird problems with google's rich snippet markup
Once upon a time, our site was ranking well and had all the markups showing up in the results. We than lost some of our rankings due to dropped links and not so well kept maintenance. Now, we are gaining up the rankings again, but the markups don't show up in the organic search results. When we Google site:oursite.com, the markups show up, but not in the organic search. There are no manual actions against our site. any idea why this would happen?
Technical SEO | | s-s0 -
Instead of a 301, my client uses a 302 to custom 404
I've found about 900 instances of decommissioned pages being redirected via 302 to a 404 custom page, even when there's a comparable page elsewhere on the site or on a new subdomain. My recommendation would be to always do a 301 from the legacy page to the new page, but since they're are so many instances of this 302->404 it seems to be standard operating procedure by the dev team. Given that at least one of these pages has links coming from 48 root domains, wouldn't it obviously be much better to 301 redirect it to pass along that equity? I don't get why the developers are doing this, and I have to build a strong case about what they're losing with this 302->404 protocol. I'd love to hear your thoughts on WHY the dev team has settled on this solution, in addition to what suffers as a result. I think I know, but would love some more expert input.
Technical SEO | | Jen_Floyd0 -
What's best practice for blog meta titles?
I have the option of placing meta titles on the actual blog, or on the blog category on my site. Should I have separate meta titles for each blog or bundle them under a category and try to drive traffic to the category? Can anyone help with best practice?
Technical SEO | | Lubeman0 -
Replacing H1's with images
We host a few Japanese sites and Japanese fonts tend to look a bit scruffy the larger they are. I was wondering if image replacement for H1 is risky or not? eg in short... spiders see: Some header text optimized for seo then in the css h1 {
Technical SEO | | -Al-
text-indent: -9999px;
} h1.header_1{ background:url(/images/bg_h1.jpg) no-repeat 0 0; } We are considering this technique, I thought I should get some advise before potentially jeopardising anything, especially as we are dealing with one of the most important on page elements. In my opinion any attempt to hide text could be seen as keyword stuffing, is it a case that in moderation it is acceptable? Cheers0 -
Any idea why our sitemap images aren't indexed?
Here's our sitemap: http://www.driftworks.com/shop/sitemap/dw_sitemap.xml In google webmaster tools, I can see the sitemap report and it says: Items:Web Submitted:2,798 Indexed:2,910 Items:Images Submitted:3,178 Indexed:0 Do you have any idea why our images are not being indexed according to webmaster tools? I checked a few of the image URLs and they worked nicely. Thanks in advance, J
Technical SEO | | DWJames0 -
Why googlebot indexing one page, not the other?
Why googlebot indexing one page, not the other in the same conditions? In html sitemap, for example. We have 6 new pages with unique content. Googlebot immediately indexes only 2 pages, and then after sometime the remaining 4 pages. On what parameters the crawler decides to scan or not scan this page?
Technical SEO | | ATCnik0