Friendly URLS (SEO urls)
-
Hello,
I own a eCommerce site with more than 5k of products, urls of products are :
www.site.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=61_87&product_id=266
Im thinking about make it friend to seo site.com/category/product-brand
Here is my question,will I lost ranks for make that change? Its very important to me know it
Thank you very much!
-
"Yes, with any URL change you will lose rank. There is a golden rule : never change URLS."
I respectfully disagree. The golden rule is keep your domain name unless the site is completely nuked. Update URLs to be more SEO friendly, especially if they look like the ones you have.
301 redirect appropriately, and if the new pages have the same content they will simply assume the ranking positions of the old URLs. Test a category first if you're nervous.
-
My experience is that any drop in rankings are extremely brief, especially if you carefully redirect all pages (as the others recommended). There have been occasions that I've seen quite the opposite happen... within 2 days, rankings shot to the top for the bulk of the phrases I was monitoring. Of course, that can be dependent upon your niche.
I have found that the long-term positive of cleaner URLs far outweighs the short-term negative. If you are careful and thorough with your 301 redirects, there might be no negative, IMHO.
-
Hello,
Yes, with any URL change you will lose rank. There is a golden rule : never change URLS.
I do understand the reason for this change and over medium - long term it might be a very good decision but on a short run you might see some Serps dance.
Now of course you need to 301 redirect each old page to the new page on a 1:1 basis. But even so you will lose some as 301 redirects don't pass all the PR from one page to another.
I had similar cases when some site went from some urls with dot asp to LAMP and they had to change any way .. with 301 redirects and new friendly URLS on short term they lost some rankings but on a long term they gain in rankings. so if you do that fro a client make them cristal clear that they will see some drops in the beginning.
If you can with this change improve other elements that will help blur the drops.
Also a very good idea is to change on stages - base don categories or something - if that is possibile as in this way you can track, monitor and adjust as you move forward and also you won't drop site wide with a full site url change. (but sometimes that's not possibile).
Hope it helps.
Cheers.
-
It's always good to have seo friendly urls, both for the bots and the users so they can easily understand what the page is about even in serps!
So you have to be cautious:
- be sure to implement well your 301s. Don't leave any page out if so you may lose real rankings
- prepare a new sitemap to submit as soon as you'll be swapping urls.
Even with that google will take a little to fully digest your new urls. SO you'll see some lower rankings at the beginning but maybe you'll recover in a couple of weeks.
Why not make a test with a bunch of lower priorities pages? So you'll be sure about the time to recover and maybe the impact will be less since it will be spreaded in a longer period.
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
-
Will using query string in the URL and swapping H1s for filtered view of the blog impact SEO negatively?
This is a blog revamp we are trying to personalize the experience for 2 separate audiences.We are revamping our blog the user starts on the blog that shows all stories (first screen) then can filter to a more specific blog (ESG or News blog). The filtered version for ESG or the News blog is done through a query string in the URL. We also swap out the page’s H1s accordingly in this process, will this impact SEO negatively?
Technical SEO | | lina_digital0 -
Page speed in relation to SEO
I cannot seem to find any information about this, so I thought I would try to get a few people's opinion. How do you think pagespeed is measured in terms of Google using it as a ranking factor? Do you think they use their internal Pagespeed app? Something during the crawl? Your GA site speed?
Technical SEO | | LesleyPaone0 -
My SEO friend says my website is not being indexed by Google considering the keywords he has placed in the page and URL what does that mean?
My SEO friend says my website is not being indexed by Google considering the keywords he has placed in the page and URL what does that mean? We have added some text in the pages with keywords thats related the page
Technical SEO | | AlexisWithers0 -
Best way to get SEO friendly URLSs on huge old website
Hi folks Hope someone may be able to help wit this conundrum: A client site runs on old tech (IIS6) and has circa 300,000 pages indexed in Google. Most pages are dynamic with a horrible URL structure such as http://www.domain.com/search/results.aspx?ida=19191&idb=56&idc=2888 and I have been trying to implement rewrites + redirects to get clean URLs and remove some of the duplication that exists, using the IIRF Isapi filter: http://iirf.codeplex.com/ I manage to get a large sample of URLS re-writing and redirecting (on a staging version of the site), but the site then slows to crawl. To imple,ent all URLs woudl be 10x the volume of config. I am starting to wonder if there is a better way: Upgrade to Win 2008 / IIS 7 and use the better URL rewrite functionality included? Rebuild the site entirely (preferably on PHP with a decent URL structure) Accept that the URLS can't be made friendly on a site this size and focus on other aspects Persevere with the IIRF filter config, and hope that the config loads into memory and the site runs at a reasonable speed when live None of the options are great as they either involve lots of work/cost of they involve keeping a site which performs well but could do so much better, with poor URLs. Any thoughts from the great minds in the SEOmoz community appreciated! Cheers Simon
Technical SEO | | SCL-SEO1 -
Backslash in URL
my main URL is www.americanmusical.com, SEOMOZ shows I have a duplicate page title on www.americanmusical.com/. I have the think the backslash is causing other issues. I noticed when I first go to my site it is without the /, but if I navigate to the home page, the URL has the / in it. Any ideas on if this is a problem or how to handle it?
Technical SEO | | dianeb1520 -
How to change URL of RSS Feed?
Hi, There are some websites that keeps on scraping my content. I have blocked them already from accessing my website using .htaccess but they still get my content via RSS feed. I have tried delaying the RSS feed but I think this affected google rankings. My question is, is there a way to change the URL of my RSS Feed? From: http://www.mysite.com/feed to http://www.mysite.com/feed2
Technical SEO | | Trigun0 -
Blog URLs
I read somewhere - pretty sure is was in Art of SEO - that having dates in the blog permalink URLs was a bad idea. e.g. /blog/2011/3/my-blog-post/ However, looking at Wordpress best practice, it's also not a good idea to have a URL without a number - it's more resource hungry if you don't , apparently. e.g. /blog/my-blog-post/ Does anyone have any views on this? Thanks Ben
Technical SEO | | atticus70 -
Is the copy-paste function under tynt.com SEO friendly
Hello you suggest http://www.tynt.com/publisher-tools/copy-and-paste-to-share-content/ in your pro tipps but I wonder why you are not using it for your own blog under seomoz.org. I noticed that when somebody copy and paste something form my blog a strange code is added to the link: Expample: http://www.janik.cc/webdesigner-blog/2011/02/sample/#ixzz1FQvadWNV Is the #ixzz1FQvadWNV maybe not that good in a seo view of point?
Technical SEO | | MichaelJanik0