New blog post URLs due to WordPress permalink structure changes. Any SEO repercussions?

[VishalRayMalik]

A client site had the follwing URLs for all blog posts: www.example.com/health-news/sample-post

www.example.com/health-news is the top level page for the blog section. While making some theme changes during Google mobilegeddon, the permalink structure got changed to www.example.com/sample-post ("health-news" got dropped from all blog post URLs).

Google has indexed the updated post structure and older URLs are getting redirected (if entered directly in the browser) to the new ones; it appears that WordPress takes care of that automatically as no 301 redirects were entered manually.

It seems that there hasn't been any loss of rankings (however not 100% sure as the site ranks for well over 100 terms).

Do you suggest changing the structure back to the old one?

Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.

[Linda-Vassily]

If you have a very small blog, with a limited number of posts on a narrow topic range, this perhaps doesn't apply.

If you are bigger than that and cover a range of topics, a multilevel structure keeps things organized, for you, your readers, and for search engines.

You can also take advantage of internal linking, organizing sub-topics under topics both so that readers can find related articles that might interest them and so that search engines can see how your posts are related, and what concepts are relevant. [A post titled "Shingles" would mean one thing under health-news, and another under building-materials.]

[VishalRayMalik]

Linda - Thanks for the response!

"If you prefer the two-level structure (which I would, for a couple of reasons)"

Would you elaborate those reasons?

[Linda-Vassily]

If the old URLs are being 301 re-directed to the new URLs, you should not lose much link authority, so that by itself shouldn't be a reason to change back.

If you prefer the two-level structure (which I would, for a couple of reasons) then go ahead and change back, but as Andy says, do it carefully so you are not sending conflicting messages.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Two reasons that I see are preserving any link juice from domains linking to old URLs and ensuring no future/current loss of rankings.

I can see no reason not to go back, just take care to ensure any old 301's are removed and that you don't fall into any redirect-chains. That could get messy.

-Andy