Need to change 1 million page URLs
-
Hey all,
I have a community site where users are uploading photos and videos. Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that. All my content pages (individual photo/video) are looking like this:
www.domain.com/12345-kw1-kw2-kw3-k4-k5 and so on. Where the 12345 is the unique content ID and the rest are keywords/tags added by the uploader.
I would like to get rid of of the keywords after the ID in the URL. My site is well coded, so this can be easily done by changing a simple function, so my content page URLs become this:
What is the best course of action? 301 the KW URLs to non-KW version? Canonical?
I really want to do this the proper way. Any advice is highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
-
" Launched in 2003, back then it wasn't such a bad idea to use keywords/tags in the URLs, so I did that." - it's not necessarily a bad idea now - I'd question why you feel the need to change them? Shorter is often better though.
If you do go ahead, 301 would be the best practice. Canonicals pass link juice too but they're not always honoured.
A couple of extra things - make sure to update all of your internal links to the new URLs as millions of 301s could negatively impact the speed of your server. And check a sample of the old URLs just to make sure everything is working as expected.
-
No worries!
I have digged into the canonicals questions so many times, thought I will clarify.Basically in me belief canonical links are a two edged weapon; if miss-used, they can lead to a total disaster.
-
Hi Keszi,
Thanks for the clarification on canonicals.
Lewis
-
What I would add to Lewis's answer, just to make it clear, canonicals do pass link juice. If you are interested, you can check this article from Dr. Pete: http://moz.com/blog/an-seos-guide-to-http-status-codes
But for sure the 301 would be the best practice in your case. Because there would be no good use to have the pictures on 2 urls (the kws and the non kws versions).
I hope this helps.
Keszi
-
Hi there,
You'll want to 301 all of the old URLs to the new ones in order to transfer any authority the pages have built up. Canonicalling will not pass any link juice, so I wouldn't do this.
Cheers,
Lewis
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
-
How To Rank Our Featured Snippet - What Changes Are Needed On Our Page?
I've read a number of articles that have been helpful, but most of them are specifically still just trying to prove the value of the snippets and more recently show you how to find what search terms to rank for. What I'm really struggling with is exactly 'How do we rank for them, when we already have the #1 position and the featured snippet is going to another site'? Let me break this down a bit more: 1. We are measuring the 'SERP Features' within Moz Pro Tools and I've identified ~300 pages where there is a 'Featured Snippet' but I don't have the feature. 2. In a good portion of these, I'm outranking the site that has the 'Featured Snippet'. So I can compare my site, side by side to the 'Featured Snippet'. Now that I have the question, my ranking and the competition all in front of me. What changes are recommended I implement on our page? Is there a recommended process to follow?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabfrug0 -
Does rewriting a URL affect the page authority?
Hi all, I recently optimized an overview page for a car rental website. Because the page didn’t rank very well, I rewrote the URL, putting the exact keyword combination in it. Then I asked Google to re-crawl the URL through Search Console. This afternoon, I checked Open Site Explorer and saw that the Page Authority had decreased to 1, while the subpages still have an authority of about 18-20. Hence my question: is rewriting a URL a bad idea for SEO? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiseDE
Lise0 -
Tens of thousands of links to less than 10 pages from 1 domain
I was looking at 'Links to your site' in Google Search Console and noticed our website has around 60 thousand followed links to 8 pages from a single domain. This is happening because we run an ad on the referring domain (a blog) and the ad is in the sidebar along with other ecommerce stores in the same niche. As a result, our ad, and most of our competitor's ads, have links showing up across this blog's entire site. Are this many links, and the type of links, a problem for SEO? I'm wondering if it would be wise to discontinue this advertising. While we get a very modest amount of traffic as a result of the ad, it doesn't convert very well, and I'm wondering if there might be any SEO benefit to not having all of these inbound links from a single domain coming in. Thanks! J
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vcj0 -
Image URL Change Catastrophe
We have a site with over 3mm pages indexed, and an XML sitemap with over 12mm images (312k indexed at peak). Last week our traffic dropped off a cliff. The only major change we made to the site in that time period was adding a DNS record for all of our images that moved them from a SoftLayer Object Storage domain to a subdomain of our site. The old URLs still work, but we changed all the links from across our site to the new subdomain. The big mistake we made was that we didn't update our XML sitemap to the new URLs until almost a week after the switch (totally forgot that they were served from a process with a different config file). We believe this was the cause of the issue because: The pages that dropped in traffic were the ones where the images moved, while other pages stayed more or less the same. We have some sections of our property where the images are, and have always been, hosted by Amazon and their rankings didn't crater. Same with pages that do not have images in the XML sitemap (like list pages). There wasn't a change in geographic breakdown of our traffic, which we looked at because the timing was around the same time as Pigeon. There were no warnings or messages in Webmaster Tools, to indicate a manual action around something unrelated. The number of images indexed in our sitemap according Webmaster Tools dropped from 312k to 10k over the past week. The gap between the change and the drop was 5 days. It takes Google >10 to crawl our entire site, so the timing seems plausible. Of course, it could be something totally unrelated and just coincidence, but we can't come up with any other plausible theory that makes sense given the timing and pages affected. The XML sitemap was updated last Thursday, and we resubmitted it to Google, but still no real change. Anyone had a similar experience? Any way to expedite the climb back to normal traffic levels? Screen%20Shot%202014-07-29%20at%203.38.34%20PM.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wantering0 -
Rel canonical on every page, pointing to home page
I've just started working with a client and have been surprised to find that every page of their site (using Concrete5 CMS) has a rel=canonical pointing to their home page. I'm feeling really dumb, because this seems like a fatal flaw which would keep Google from ranking any page other than the home page... but when I look at Google Analytics, Content > Site Content > Landing Pages, using Secondary Dimension = Source, it seems that Google is delivering users to numerous pages on their site. Can anyone help me out?! Thanks very much!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | measurableROI0 -
Pages that takes more then 1,5 second to load penalized?
Hi all I just read an article (print) about the importance of af having a fast website. The author claims that all pages that are taking longer than 1,5 second to load is getting penalized in the SERPS. Speed is of course a ranking factor. But I have never heard a statement like this before. Is 1,5 second a guideline from Google? Can anyone say, where this number is coming from? Is there maybe another guideline to be followed? Thanks in advance for your comments / answers 🙂 Best regards, Kenneth Karl Nielsen
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KennethK0 -
Effect of URL change on Website
Hello we are developers and we have just created a new webpage for a client of us. The problem is that we can not replace the old one by the new one, cause our client has developed over 15 satellite pages that calls directly to the code of the old page. If we completly remove the old page we will make those 15 pages go down. Those pages are working over domains specially register for SEO reasons. For example Main page is www.euroair.es Satellite page is www.aireacondicionadodaikin.com Satellite page has pretty good ranking for search term "aire acondicionado daikin" As I told you, we have a new page but we can not make the page work over root domain. So we thought we could make it work over www.euroair.es/es, and make a redirection 301 of homepage and another important inner pages. We chose "/es" folder because it seems like a language folder, but we are not very sure of the effects of pages working on that folder instead of working on root directory. What do you think? Is this matter important or doesn't? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | teconsite.com0 -
Should we block urls like this - domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=ascℴ=price&price=1 within the robots.txt?
I've recently added a campaign within the SEOmoz interface and received an alarming number of errors ~9,000 on our eCommerce website. This site was built in Magento, and we are using search friendly url's however most of our errors were duplicate content / titles due to url's like: domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=1 and domainname/shop/leather-chairs.html?brand=244&cat=16&dir=asc&order=price&price=4. Is this hurting us in the search engines? Is rogerbot too good? What can we do to cut off bots after the ".html?" ? Any help would be much appreciated 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280