Value of URL Changes
-
Hi Guys,
I have a question. Each product listed on my webstie has product number like /product.php?id=3624. After I spent many hours with MOZ, I figured out that this approach is wrong and I should use the product name as URL to achieve better SEO performance.
Now I am planing to change the URL generating algoritm but should I do it for existing products. Some of them have already been linked to external websites. I am thinking to create mirror URLs but this may cause rather damage on my website. Do you know what is the right answer?
Best,
Tony
-
I agree with Alex I was trying to think of a way to make the URLs little bit shorter and would recommend doing so as well.
The chicken is not an insult it is an analogy of somebody making changes to a site without checking the site structure and testing it prior.
When you make the changes use a tool like deep crawl or Screaming Frog SEO Spider
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/test-development-changes/
Look out for redirect chains shown below and or redirecting which you can check using this handy tool in addition to the other fantastic tools above.
https://varvy.com/tools/redirects/
You need to redirect from https// & http:// to one URL
See the bigger photo here http://i.imgur.com/zQYE65R.png
please keep in mind the chicken is just to be humorous and lighten everyone's day it's not an insult.
Respectfully,
Thomas
-
There's always a small amount of authority lost through a 301 redirect or canonical, but as long as you set the 301 redirects up correctly I wouldn't worry about it. It should benefit your site in the long-term.
I've overseen a few site migrations where unfriendly URLs (e.g. /product.php?id=1234) were replaced with friendly URLs (e.g. /category/product) and more often than not, immediately after the migration organic traffic and rankings remained consistent or improved. I think there was one where traffic and rankings dropped in the short-term but then recovered to a better level within a month.
If you go ahead with the URL change and 301 redirects, keep a crawl/record of your current website, then when you've completed the redirects, crawl the old URLs to see if they're redirecting as you expect. If they're not, fix them as quickly as you can.
I agree with Tom in terms of the URL structure and breadcrumb trail, though I am a fan of short URLs, so I'd shorten some of the category names when used in your URLs e.g.
/transport/air
instead of
/motors-and-transport/air-transportAlso be aware that
/transport/air
is different to
/transport/air/- so make sure only one version exists - with or without the trailing slash.
-
Hi Tom,
Thanks for your reply.
I thought that if I used 301 for redirection would work. What are methods that will not affect my traction?
Best,
Tony
-
Tony on the URL I referenced below there is a clear breadcrumb trail to the product. If you created URLs that used a subfolder for the category and then an additional subfolder for the product new for instance / The used a subfolder for the category and then an additional subfolder for the product new for instance
- www.threeding.com/antiques-historical/gravestone/
- www.threeding.com/antiques-historical/early-middle-ages/gravestone/
HOME ANTIQUES & HISTORICAL EARLY MIDDLE AGES GRAVESTONE
As Alex said anytime you change your URL structure or your site structure you are going to deal with a lot of complications. Including loss of traction in the search engine's. There are methods of doing it where you go about making small changes as you work.
Let me know if this is something you're considering doing it so I'll give you more information on it and I if you want.
All the best, Tom
-
Hi Tony,
I took a random URL
http://www.threeding.com/product.php?id=567 out of your site and found the structure was identical to what you had shown us.
If you give me some time and happy to give you a lot more information on what can be done to help you.
I see Not found “Rel="canonical"Not found
http://www.threeding.com/product.php?id=567
Meta Robots
Not found
Rel="canonical"
Not found
Page Load Time 2.394 seconds Google Cache URL
http://google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.threeding.com/product.php?id=567
IP Address 54.72.236.205 Country United States
Private message me or allow me 24 hours and I will have quite a bit more data
Tom
-
Hi Alex, Thomas,
Thanks a lot. Much appreciate your responds.
Thomas,
We use proprietary CMS. You can take a look at my website. www.threeding.com. I have noticed there are a lot of things to improve. The platform has plenty of content, much more than the competition but Google ranking is lower than many of the competitors. Now I am reading about SEO and it seems that we are on the right way.
Regards,
Tony
-
Tony,
Are using magento as a CMS platform if not what CMS?
you do not want to kill your crawl budget by having Google index session ID URLs.
http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/news/2064349/crawl-index-rank-repeat-a-tactical-seo-framework
- https://blog.kissmetrics.com/googlebot-optimization/
- http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization
- http://www.seoadjust.com/seo/url-parameters-in-google-webmaster-tools/
Indicate How to Handle Dynamic Parameters
Tell Google and other search engines when to ignore any parameters added to your URL, such as a session ID or pagination. By doing this you are telling Google that http://yourdomain.com/keyword?sessionid=54 has the same content as http://yourdomain.com/keyword.Try using the URL Parameters tool in Google Webmaster Tools. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/crawl-url-parameters
Depending on your content management system, the URLs it generates may be “pretty” like this one:
or “ugly” like this one:
-
https://www.quicksprout.com/2015/04/06/does-url-structure-even-matter-a-data-driven-answer/
-
http://www.wordtracker.com/academy/learn-seo/technical-guides/seo-clean-urls
-
http://mysiteauditor.com/blog/top-10-most-important-seo-tips-for-url-optimization/
-
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/five-steps-to-seo-friendly-site-url-structure/
-
https://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization
-
https://moz.com/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work
-
https://moz.com/blog/4-graphics-to-help-illustrate-onpage-optimization
Large photo
https://moz.com/rand/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/elements-optimized-lrg.gif
- https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-glossary-url-definitions/
- http://stallion-theme.co.uk/seo-static-html-vs-dynamic-urls/
- https://www.searchenginegenie.com/Dynamic-URLs-versus-Static-URLs.html
- http://platform.productsup.com/help/35
- https://moz.com/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-the-best-practice-for-seo-is-still-clear
-
Hey Tony and Alex,
Thumbs up Alex did an excellent job of explaining what I was trying to get across. I apologize I did not have much time when I replied.
Tony I agree with everything Alex has said I would award him best answer.
Sincerely,
Tom
-
It isn't wrong to use question marks in URLs.
However - as Thomas says, short and descriptive URLs describe what is on the page, whereas the query parameters you use currently don't. "Keyword present in the page's URL" was also believed to be an important ranking factor by the participants in Moz's Ranking Factors survey earlier this year: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors/survey
By mirroring URLs, will each product then exist at 2 URLs? E.g.:
example.com/product.php?id=3624
and
example.com/category/productIf so, you don't want to do that as it creates duplicate content. Using canonical tags to fix the duplication doesn't solve the problem completely.
If you change URLs, you should 301 redirect the old to the new, so
example.com/product.php?id=3624
would 301 redirect to
example.com/category/productJust in case you aren't aware - a "301" is a permanent redirect, so when using a permanent redirect, even if other websites have linked to example.com/product.php?id=3624 - the browser will automatically redirect to the new URL, passing most of the authority built up from the links you mentioned.
Whether I'd advise you to change the URLs of existing products depends on whether you can implement the redirects. In the short-term you'll lose a slight bit of link authority through the redirect, but in the longer-term, the frendlier URLs should benefit your website.
Also, there's always a risk when making large scale changes to URL structure - you need to make sure customers can still navigate the site without issues, and search engine crawlers understand the changes you've made - 301 redirects are best-practice to ensure this.
Ideally, when URLs are changed, all internal links should be updated.
-
Thanks. In this case I will duplicate the products and use the absolute canonical.
Just want to make sure I understand correctly: All my products URL's are with question marks. I just don't understand, is this wrong?
Regards,
Tony
-
/product.php?id=3624 In in the example you have given it shows a question mark which means you are hopefully not using that URL as your canonical.
/product/shoes/air-jordans/ vs /product.php?id=3624
Would tell a customer
more about what they are actually clicking on.
Remember that you have given an example of “?” “<element id="id”>”
Please use the absolute canonical and do not change-year-old links
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
-
Redirect chains error on the home page URL
Hello Everyone, I'm getting redirect chains error on the home page URL:
On-Page Optimization | | Nikhil_Falcon
http://ebitdacatalyst.com in Wordpress. I've checked my redirection list in the plugin, and haven't found any redirections on http://ebitdacatalyst.com. Can anyone please help me in solving this issue? I don't know where from it's coming.0 -
Google changing my Title
I noticed today that Google is showing a different Title in searches for the homepage. It is showing a title which I believe was active as of late last year or early January. The new title is in the title tag, in Google cache and in MOZ crawls as well. Not sure why it would still be showing a different title in the search and wanted to see if anyone can explain the reason. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | campaigneast0 -
Change of URL + SEO Impact
We recently changed the URLs from our site http://www.website.com (old)
On-Page Optimization | | ederdesign
https://website.com/us/en/ (new) Our ranking is plummeting every since and I wonder if the new URL had something to do with it. Do you know if that change, could have impacted the ranking?0 -
Using keywords in my URL: Doing a redirect to /keyword
My website in "On Page Grade" received an A.Anyway, I only have 1 thing to optimize:_"Use Keywords in your URL__Using your targeted keywords in the URL string adds relevancy to your page for search engine rankings, assists potential visitors identify the topic of your page from the URL, and provides SEO value when used as the anchor text of referring links."_My website is ranking in top10 for a super high competitive keyword and all my others competitors have the keyword on their domain, but not for my URL.Since I can't change my domain for fixing this suggestion, I would like to know what do you think about doing a 301 redirect from / to mydomainname.com/keyword/So the index of my website would be the /keyword.I don't know if this can make a damage to my SERP for the big change ir it would be a great choice.
On-Page Optimization | | estebanseo0 -
Changing an Aged Category Name
I am interested in potentially changing a category name on our site, WirelessEmporium.com. This section has been called "Covers & Faceplates" for the better part of the decade. However, changing search trends, PPC data and search volume analysis have indicated that our preferable KW combo may be "Cases & Covers" instead. What are the potentially ramifications of making the switch now? We have a significant amount of age, link juice, etc built up toward our "Covers & Faceplates" section at the moment and all of their relevant URLs. A change would involve 301 redirects, rewriting of URLs, rewriting of all tags, img alt tags, etc.
On-Page Optimization | | eugeneku0 -
Change from Table Based to DIV based
Hello, I am about to change my sitewide template from a table based one to a div based one. I am obviously worried about losing ranking and optimistic it hopefully may improve rankings. Any thoughts/experience on this? I have done my best to keep all content, tags (H, alt, title, etc) the same but figured I would see if anybody had any good tips/suggestions? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | JohnHerrigel0 -
Value in a bottom navigation bar?
How useful is it to have links in the bottom navigation bar? I'm considering to putting a mini site map in the bottom navigation bar but was told that these links carry virtually no SEO value and could actually hamper it as it would bring the total number of links on the page over 100.
On-Page Optimization | | walidalsaqqaf0 -
Would it be bad to change the canonical URL to the most recent page that has duplicate content, or should we just 301 redirect to the new page?
Is it bad to change the canonical URL in the tag, meaning does it lose it's stats? If we add a new page that may have duplicate content, but we want that page to be indexed over the older pages, should we just change the canonical page or redirect from the original canonical page? Thanks so much! -Amy
On-Page Optimization | | MeghanPrudencio0