Preserving Social Shares Through URL Changes
-
We are making significant URL changes to our website. Because the URL is changing the social sharing buttons are not showing previous shared counts. I have read several resources like the one below that is linked to in several other similar questions.
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172926/How-to-Maintain-Social-Shares-After-a-Site-Migration
However I would love to get some insight from someone who has done this and there thoughts on the outcome. As an ecommerce site the "Social Proof" of products that have received social shares is a big deal to us.
In Mike Kings example above the counts are being attributed to the OLD URL which is problematic over time. Our site has been up for over 12 years and has had several major changes to it, and I am certain there will be more in the future, being able to preserve the count on the current URL is ideal. While I agree with him that over time I believe social platforms will let data pass through 301 redirects, until then I need to find the best way to do this. Also with his example and others I have seen people mention than new likes from the new url can reset the counter. If you have gone through this and have ideas pleas share them. I look forward to your thoughts thanks.
-
I think that's a great idea actually.
-
Mike,
Thanks a ton for jumping in, I really appreciate it! I may have a hybrid solution using part of your suggestion.
We have toyed with the idea of creating a custom URL for each product (easy to automate on our end) that is tied to the product number. That way if the URL changes in the future (if we did an architecture redesign which will happen again I am sure) the share count will still be connected to the unique url so it will last over time. The URL that is shared just redirects to the product page just like if I was using a URL shortner. In testing we are having issues with Twitter being able to recognize this and increase the shared count number on the product page, even though shared count is recognizing it. So if we amended our code to call from the shared count API to pull the old numbers until passed by the new numbers like you suggested I believe it would give a very accurate result. Also moving forward url changes down the line would not affect the numbers because they are unique to the product number.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you see any pitfalls?
-
Hey Jared,
As you might imagine I have done this. In fact we did it with the iAcquire.com redesign when I was still there. Basically we built something custom to grab the social counts and display them in our custom social share buttons. Our Creative Director wanted to make custom share buttons because they are otherwise different sizes and it looks silly. Then we just set the old URL in one place in the CMS and it pinged SharedCount.com's API to get all the different share counts and display them.
A quick update to my post, from what I understand, social shares are hopping 301s for Google +1s only right now.
As far as your issue with the new shares being attributed to old URLs, that's something I've thought about as well. You could potentially build a similar solution that we had, but allow the new social shares to go with the new URL and check the number of social shares between the new and old URL whenever the page loads. Once the new URL surpasses the old one's share count just skip grabbing the old URL's share counts altogether and use the new URL for both displaying share counts and capturing new shares.
Let me know if that helps. I'm sure we can perfect a solution for you, but it will involve getting a little creative.
-Mike
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
-
Change category of a post
Hi, Finally I decide to renovate my site structure, but I have a question, if I have an old post and I change its category there is some SEO problem? The post permalink is "www.sitename.com/namepost". Last question, it's better to have one category for post or more than one category for post? Thank You
Technical SEO | | Marco3961 -
#Page Jump link sharing
Hi I'm managing an in-house link building campaign in order to help in our key search term 'Location Holidays'. We were historically number 1 for this term until a recent re-design in May where our web design agency butchered our SEO. All of the main issued fixed, we're now fluctuating between 3rd & 4th on a daily basis. I'm putting together a social share comp to promote through the press in order to boost our backlink profile. We're nesting the competition within the body of the page we want to improve the rankings for. I will be including a #page jump link to quickly access it as it will be further down the page. My question is that if we get press to link to http://holidaycompany.com/destination/#comp will http://holidaycompany.com/destination/ receive the link juice or will http://holidaycompany.com/destination/#comp be looked upon as a whole new page? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | MattHolidays0 -
URL Structure
Hi, Hope you are all well. On our website we have a 'blog' and a 'news' section. The blog is located on "/blog" - but when you click on a post the url structure changes to /name-of-article and the blog subdomain isn't included. Would it be better to have "blog/name-of-article as this would then make the blog perform better in search results? Also, if our news page is under /news - but when you click on an article it changes to /news-article/name-of-article Wouldn't it be better to have /news/name-of-article Thanks a lot!! 🙂
Technical SEO | | National-Homebuyers0 -
SEO of Social Media Pages
I have noticed something odd about how Google ranks social media pages, and was hoping someone would have a good explanation. When I search for a particular name in Google, the first two results are Twitter pages of two people who share the same name. #1 is an older account with more Tweets, but it has fewer followers, no external backlinks, and the URL is unrelated to the name #2 is a newer account, but it has more followers, a few external backlinks, and the name itself is in the URL. It has fewer overall Tweets, but has Tweeted more frequently over the past several months. #2 is also happens to be in the same City as I am. Given my understanding of Google's ranking factors, I would not have expected #1 to outrank #2. In fact, I would not have expected #1 to even be on the first page. What could be causing #1 to rank so highly? Does it make sense that the age of the account or the number of Tweets would affect SEO at all? Really, I am just trying to understand what are the main factors that determine the ranking of social media profile pages. Thanks
Technical SEO | | timsegraves0 -
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 -
Sharing the same content on every page
As an ecommerce site, one of the tabs on the product description is filled with delivery information. This tab is populated the same way on every product page. I think this is contributing to an increased score on my pages similarity to each other. Is there a way to obscure this info for se's and is it worthwhile doing so?
Technical SEO | | LadyApollo0 -
Changing CMS, are there SEO effects?
We want to change our cms from typo3 to CMS made Simple. We have done this already for another site and it effected the rankings. Have you got experience with this? What factors are important for SEO to consider? Is it normal when you change from cms the rankings will drop?
Technical SEO | | PlusPort0 -
Handling '?' in URLs.
Adios! (or something), I've noticed in my SEOMoz campaign that I am getting duplicate content warnings for URLs with extensions. For example: /login.php?action=lostpassword /login.php?action=register etc. What is the best way to deal with these type of URLs to avoid duplicate content penelties in search engines? Thanks 🙂
Technical SEO | | craigycraig0