URL Change Best Practice
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I'm changing the url of some old pages to see if I can't get a little more organic out of them.
After changing the url, and maybe title/desc tags as well, I plan to have Google fetch them.
How does Google know that the old url is 301'd to the new url and the new url is not just a page of duplicate content?
Thanks... Darcy
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Yes, and this is especially problematic if you change all of your internal links to point to the new page, thereby leaving Google little reason to recrawl the old page. There are a couple of quick, simple solutions to this...
1. Update your XML sitemap to include the OLD URLs and set their priority to 1, update frequency to daily, and last updated date to today. This will tell Google that the old URLs are important and updated, so you may be able to coax Google to recrawl them quickly.
2. Use "Fetch as Googlebot" on the old URLs to show Google the 301 redirects
These are, admittedly, speculative, but Google hasn't given us a clear solution to this very common problem. Good luck!
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Hi Bryan,
Wouldn't it have to re-crawl the old url to see that if forwards to the new url?
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So long as you set your 301 redirect up correctly, it's not an issue. A 301 tells Google that Page-A should permanently direct to Page-B. Because this is often done to replace or update a page, Google and others will know that the similarity / duplicitous nature of the pages is likely due to that very same thing.
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