Site restructure question
-
Our site was deigned years ago to target customers in specific cities, now we've grown beyond this and I believe it is time to change the site structure.
Ignore the 302 from the root page.Current structure: (assuming you've never been to our site before)
projectmanagementacademy.net 302->/select-location.php
/select-location.php -> /city-name/pmp-training.php This page was meant to be a "homepage" for each city, pointless page really
/city-name/pmp-training.php -> /ciy-name/product-name.php These pages are for each individual product
My suggested site structure:
/city-name/pmp-training.php becomes projectmanagementacademy.net no more redirect /city-name/pmp-training.php gets removed and 301 to root page.
/product-name.php each product's page and you would select a location when necessary (some products are online only) would 301 each /city-name/product-name to corresponding product page
/product-name/city-name.php could add these pages if we still wanted the city name in url for city specific products
My thoughts here are /product-name.php would receive a higher % of link juice because there are fewer page between 2 vs 4 if you came to the root page. and 2 vs 3 if you came from the select-location page. Also instead of being split between over 50 locations, all these would be together on one page.
- Your thoughts?
- Would this change improve our SERP for those product pages?
- Would we see a drop off in traffic if we did this?
- How long, if done correctly, would it take to see the recovery of rankings and traffic?
- Could we 301 /select-location.php to the root page?
Thanks in advance for your insights to this. Any answer is a good answer.
Trenton
-
You guys are awesome and lifesavers! I'll report back, after we do the change, and let everyone know how this all went! Thanks a million!
-
Trenton this is a great question. Yes, you should go ahead and redirect that page to the new home page, as it was your former home page. Even though the content is different you should be able to move the pagerank over to the new home page by use of the 301 redirect. Google does treat some redirects to the home page as a 404, such as when someone redirects every page from one domain to the homepage of another, but I think you will be fine in this situation.
-
I think it would be a good idea to redirect your select-location page to your new homepage. You will be able to take advantage of the link juice obtained, before Google re-indexes your pages. Moreover, doing a redirect is better than directing your visitors to a 404 page - they will be annoyed with the latter and likely to leave your site immediately.
-
I appreciate the response, hopefully we can get a moz employee to help out too. It would go a long way in convincing the dev team that the change is necessary. I did multiple searches and never truly found concrete document saying how this would affect us.
Also, could we 301 our select-location page to our new homepage? They would not be the same content and I was curious if this would have a negative effect on our website. That page has the majority of the backlinks to our site, and I'd rather not lose them.
-
Hi Trenton,
If I understand correctly, you are restructuring your site to a product-centric structure, as compared to a location-centric structure? If that is the case, I certainly think this is a better structure. From what I see, you have similar content across each of your city site, which doesn't look good from a SEO perspective since they can be treated as duplicate content. If your company is offering the same range of products across several locations, it will be a good idea to focus on developing product pages as compared to city pages.
You may notice a slight drop in SERP temporarily by when changing your site structure, but with proper 301 redirects and some time, your SERP shouldn't be greatly affected. Consolidating information on your site will go a long way in improving your SERP in the long term.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Question about creating content pages for keywords
Good morning, We are trying to rank our India based company which provides the following services
On-Page Optimization | | harshal.khatavkar
Engineering Design Services
Architectural Design Services
MEP Design Services Our target audiences are in the US and UK. Offcource, we are targetting above services keywords on most of our main pages and created dedicated services pages too. But lately, we found out that we are ranking well for keywords like Outsourcing Engineering Design Services, Outsourcing Architectural Design Services, etc... which are actually very very good keywords in terms of closing the leads/inquiries as people are actually looking out for outsourcing but the search count for those keywords is low. (though we closed 2 inquiries from those keywords). These pages we created in past just to increase the content of the website. I really want to give it a try to target those keywords by creating more pages, blog posts, backlinks, etc... My question is if we create more and more pages around those keywords then will it affect the rankings of the pages which are already ranking for those keywords or will the new pages compete against those pages or the new pages will help to boost current pages? We can write good content and blog posts on the outsourcing topic but not sure if we should create new pages or increase the length of the existing pages. Can you guys please help with some directions on this as I really don't want to take the wrong route. Look forward! Regards0 -
Keyword Stuffing Question
Say your on a e-commerce category page "Shirts" every lower level category has "shirts" in it such as: T-shirt, long sleeve shirt, sweat shirt, v-neck shirt, and so on. Is this page going to be penalized in google for the keyword "shirts" just because it is in the title and on the page a thousand times because i'm targetting words like "long sleeve shirt? and if it is, will the "long sleeve shirt" keyword be negatively affected as well? Answer much appreciated,
On-Page Optimization | | Mike.Bean
Thanks in advance.0 -
Question about multiple versions of home page
Hi guys, I'm having a question, answer to which i'm unable to find anywhere. I browesed the whole internet lol. So the question is about multipple versions of the home page. In particular, i want to know how should i deal with home page URLs with this extention: /index.html All the rest possible versions of home page i know how to deal with but this one "/index.html" i don't. I did add a cononical tag to it but i'm wondering whether or not i should add 301 redirect to chosen version og the home page (let's say it is www.mydomain.com). Please advise the best practices on how to deal with this. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | odmsoft0 -
Duplicate content question
Hi I have a site that is run off one CMS system but has 3 different web addresses. One is a comic shop, one is a toy shop and one is a game shop. Now due to the nature of what we are selling some of the products we are selling on both or all 3 of the sites. I was wondering as to whether this would affect my ability to rank in google and if i would be penalised for any duplicate content? Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | TheZenAgency0 -
Boatload of 301 Redirects Question
We have a client that came to us and they recently did a site makeover. Previously they had all their pages in root directory including 75+ spammy article pages. On their makeover, they moved all the article pages into a directory and added 301 redirects. In going over their site we noticed they have redundant articles, like an article on blue-marble-article.htm and blue-marbles-article.htm Playing on singular and plural with dulpicate content for most part with exception to making it plural. If they have 75 articles, Id say 1/3 are actually somewhat original content. I would like to 301 redirect 2/3's of the articles to better re-written article pages but that would add a whole lot more 301 redirects. We would then have a 301 redirect from root directory to article directory, then another 301 redirect from spam article to new re-written article. My question is, would this be too many redirects for googlebot to sort through and would it be too confusing or send bad signals? Or should I create a new directory with all good articles and just redirect the entire old articles directory to the new one? Or just delete the redirects and old spammy directory and let those fall on a 404 error page. Id hate to lose 50-75 pages but I think its in fact those spammy pages that could be why the site fell from top of first page google to third page and now 10th page in a years time. I know, Im confused just typing this out. Hope it makes sense for some good feedback and advise. Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
2 Question about URL structure
Hello guys 1 - I have a question about the best structure for URLs from the point of view of SEO: Is it OK to use the URL as mywebsite.com.br/long-tail-article Or is better this mywebsite.com.br/category/long-tail-article 2 - When part of my keyword is already in my "category", for example: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing/digital-marketing-is-good I leave it as it is, or in the following way: mywebsite.com.br/digital-marketing-is-good NOTE: Do not take into account that this URL would be different from other URLs in this category
On-Page Optimization | | seomasterbrasil0 -
URL Structure for Home Decorating site
Hi, I am about to launch a home decorating ideas website. I am stuck to determining the ideal URL structure, and the options are: Category: myhomedecoratingsite.com/room/master-suite/
On-Page Optimization | | adepalma
myhomedecoratingsite.com/kitchen/
myhomedecoratingsite.com/room/living
myhomedecoratingsite.com/master-suite/
myhomedecoratingsite.com/living-room/ Post: myhomedecoratingsite.com/interior/beautiful-master-suite/
myhomedecoratingsite.com/interior/cozy-living-room/
myhomedecoratingsite.com/room/master-suite/beautiful-modern-suite/
myhomedecoratingsite.com/room/living/cozy-contemporary-living Are these any good? What your best suggestion? Thanks in advance for your inputs. Al0 -
SSL sites and SEO
I'm seeing a lot about how SSL sites can negatively affect SEO from the analytics perspective, but if duplicate content issues are addressed and load times are OK, what else is there to worry about? Any advice is much appreciated. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | PerfectPitchConcepts0
