Changing URLs from sentence case to lower case
-
Hi Guys,
We are contemplating of changing our site URL structure from sentence case to all lowercase.
www.example.com/All-Products/Bedroom-Furniture/
www.example.com/all-products/bedroom-furniture/
We will use 301 redirect for old to new.
Its a 3 year old ecommerce site and currently rank very decent on serps.
The agency that does our seo is recommending this change and reckons that all lowecase URLs as preferred over our current URL structure.
My worry is we will lose our current ranking but agency advises that rankings will probably go lower or fluctuate for some time and get back to its original position or may even rank better in due course as we are doing a 301 redirect and once the site is crawled Google will know the change.
We are approaching Christmas and thenext 2 months are most busiest period of the year, we don't want to risk on traffic.
I would really appreciate if the community experts can advise,
Is it really that lowercase URLs are better than our current url structure?
By doing 301 will our rankings come back to same in "due course" ?
How much of a risk is it to do these changes at this time of the year?
Thanking you in advance,
Sohail
-
Just in case later in the future you want to turn all your URLs to lower case you can do something like this
In your .htaccess file insert this
ensure it is not a file on the drive first
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-s
RewriteRule (.*) rewrite-strtolower.php?rewrite-strtolower-url=$1 [QSA,L]Then in your root directory place a file called rewrite-strtolower.php and insert
if(isset($_GET['rewrite-strtolower-url'])) {
$url = $_GET['rewrite-strtolower-url'];
unset($_GET['rewrite-strtolower-url']);
$params = http_build_query($_GET);
if(strlen($params)) {
$params = '?' . $params;
}
header('Location: http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . '/' . strtolower($url) . $params, true, 301);
}
exit();
?> -
Hello Guys,
Thank you for your reply and excellent advises. We have made a decision to drop the transformation all together and will continue with our existing URL structure.
Thank you all again.
Cheers !
-
For Google there is no preference for upper or lower case - so the proposed change will bring you no benefit. Even if the migration risk is very small, if you are close to your most important sales period - don't do it.
Dirk
-
By doing the 301 your agency is right you won't lose ranking but whenever you make a change, google needs time to take those changes in. They are right you will go down and back up. I don't see how you will go higher by changing the URL.
If the next few months are big times of the year for you than your better off waiting until after xmas to make the change. You have gone three years like this with no issue so really another few months won't hurt. It's not worth the risk because things can always go wrong and even more so when it comes to 301 URLs if something goes wrong it can really hurt.
Also when doing the change ask your SEO firm how they will be doing it. I find setting a RewriteRule in htaccess to change all uppercase URLs to lowercase URLs make it easier and safer than insure 301 is setup for each URL.
-
Sohail
I am not happy. Good question to ask. If it works - do not touch it. The first principal in SEO is do no harm.
I would consider terminating them... poor advice leading into the most important time for sales for you for the year. They sound like a web developer not an seo consultant.
Sorry I am a bit grumpy... but do not like it. Your intuition is spot on.
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
-
Why a certain URL ( a category URL ) disappears?
the page hasn't been spammed. - links are natural - onpage grader is perfect - there are useful high ranking articles linking to the page...pretty much everything is okay.....also all of my websites pages are okay and none of them has disappeared only this one ( the most important category of my site. )
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mohamadalieskandariii0 -
URL Rewriting Best Practices
Hey Moz! I’m getting ready to implement URL rewrites on my website to improve site structure/URL readability. More specifically I want to: Improve our website structure by removing redundant directories. Replace underscores with dashes and remove file extensions for our URLs. Please see my example below: Old structure: http://www.widgets.com/widgets/commercial-widgets/small_blue_widget.htm New structure: https://www.widgets.com/commercial-widgets/small-blue-widget I've read several URL rewriting guides online, all of which seem to provide similar but overall different methods to do this. I'm looking for what's considered best practices to implement these rewrites. From what I understand, the most common method is to implement rewrites in our .htaccess file using mod_rewrite (which will find the old URLs and rewrite them according to the rewrites I implement). One question I can't seem to find a definitive answer to is when I implement the rewrite to remove file extensions/replace underscores with dashes in our URLs, do the webpage file names need to be edited to the new format? From what I understand the webpage file names must remain the same for the rewrites in the .htaccess to work. However, our internal links (including canonical links) must be changed to the new URL format. Can anyone shed light on this? Also, I'm aware that implementing URL rewriting improperly could negatively affect our SERP rankings. If I redirect our old website directory structure to our new structure using this rewrite, are my bases covered in regards to having the proper 301 redirects in place to not affect our rankings negatively? Please offer any advice/reliable guides to handle this properly. Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheDude0 -
URL Change Best Practice
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
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Mixing static.htm urls and dynamic urls on a Windows IIS Server?
Hi all, We've had a website originally built using static html with .htm extensions ranking well in Google hence we want to keep those pages/urls. We are on a dedicated sever (Windows IIS). However our developer has custom made a new DYNAMIC section for the site which shows new added products dynamically and allows them to be booked online via shopping cart. We are having problems displaying them both on the same domain even if we put the dynamic section withing its own subfolder and keep the static htms in the root. Is it possible to have both function on IIS (even if they may have to function a little separately)? Does anyone have previous experience of this kind of issue or a way of making both work? What setup do we need to do on the dedicated server.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emerald0 -
URL categorization / subfolders
Hi Mozzers, We're currently in the process of a website redesign with new CMS and have the opportunity to change URL and structure. I would love some opinions as to what the best practise will be. A quick prerequisite, the website is entirely about France. French property, living, holidays, forum - everything. Therefore, we're unsure of the usage of the word France/French. Presently, we're running Classic ASP which allows for one subfolder then dynamic article ID. In my examples, I will take our activity holidays URL. At present this is /france-activity-holidays/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345. We know that DisplayArticle.asp?ID=12345 will simply become [article-title], however, its the preceding subfolders I would like some help with. Here are our thoughts on the options available. Can you please vote as to which you think is the best? /france-activity-holidays/ (one subfolder per category, as at present) /france/holidays/activity/ (always have a first subfolder with the word france) /holidays-to-france/activity-holidays/ (france in the primary subfolder) /holidays/activity-holidays-france/ (france in the secondary subfolder) /holidays/activity/ (because the whole website is about France, it is redundant to have /france/) /French-holidays/activity/ My gut feeling is either number 2 or 5. Concise, good for UX, OK for SEO. However, there is very little information around that is relevant to our sector. Thanks in advance! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Horizon0 -
URL or Domain length
Hi All, I am wondering if google still does give importance to the length of the domain or url. If yes then how much is the acceptable length of a domain and URL. Many Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | HiteshBharucha0 -
Spammy? Long URLs
Hi All: Is it true that URLs such as this following one are viewed as "spammy" (besides being too long) and that such URLs will negatively affect ranks for keywords and page ranks: http://www.repairsuniverse.com/ipod-parts-ipod-touch-replacement-repair-parts-ipod-touch-1st-gen-replacement-repair-parts.html My thinking is that the page will perform better once it is 301 redirected to a shorter page name, such as: http://www.repairsuniverse.com/ipod-touch-1G-replacement-parts.html It also appears that these long URLs are also more likely to break, creating unnecessary 404s. <colgroup><col width="301"></colgroup> Thanks for your insight on this issue!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | holdtheonion0 -
Rel=Canonical URLs?
If I had two pages: PageA about Cats PageB about Dogs If PageA had a link rel=canonical to PageB, but the content is different, how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?" If PageA 301 redirected to PageB, (no content in PageA since it's 301 redirected), how would Google resolve this and what would users see if they searched "Cats" or "Dogs?"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | visionnexus0