Shortened page titles and changed urls to match, will this effect my page rankings?
-
In my recent crawl, I was given a bunch of 200 errors for having titles too long, i rewrote the titles and changed the URLs to match (using wordpress). I was then informed by my boss that changing the URLs like I did (www.website.com/abc ->www.website.com/xyz) may have changed our page rank for those pages and if so i should revert them to the old urls.
There are about 14 titles in total that I made these changes to. Would it be quicker to change the URL's to their old names, or better for me to use 301 redirects to point the old urls to the new ones?
Will either renaming the urls of the new titled blogs with their old titles or using 301 redirects have better SEO results?
Does wordpress automatically make these redirects for me? When I click a link of the old urls I kept saved in a document it still goes to the page.
-
Also, for the future, I recommend using two plugins for WordPress:
- Redirection by John Godley: This plugin lets you set up redirects within the WP dashboard, which means you can keep track of what's being redirected where within your WP administration.
- Yoast SEO by Team Yoast: This plugin lets you add and edit a lot of different SEO-related items, gives you tips regarding keywords you want to focus on, and a lot more. It's incredibly useful.
To be clear, I don't work for or with either of these developers/teams, but they're great plugins that sound as though they'd be especially helpful for you.
-
If I understood what you're saying, it seems as though you may have mistaken page title and URL for the same thing. You can alter a page title without affecting the URL and vice versa. For example, in Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), the blue text shown for each result is the page title, while the URL is in green text.
Now, with that said, page titles shouldn't exceed about 150 characters. This is because after this point, the title will be truncated and the entire title will, therefore, not be shown (only part of it will).
Regarding switching the URLs back to their originals, I'd recommend simply changing them back to what they were rather than redirecting them. Either way, it sounds like this whole endeavor has hurt your SEO, and either method may have implications. When you do this, any URL that is not hardcoded should be fixed by WordPress automatically. What this means is, while links populated internally (ex: in menus, navigation, footer) should be changed by WordPress without you having to do anything - though I'd strongly suggest you double-check these manually. However, the hardcoded links (ex: links in body text, images, some widgets) might not be resolved by WordPress automatically. These you will probably need to tend to on your own. Meaning, if in the second paragraph of blog article A, you link to blog article B: you'll probably need to edit the page for blog article A and replace the old URL with the new.
If you need any clarifications or further help, please ask! And sorry if I mistook anything you'd said.
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
-
Are FAQ's Pages Still Useful?
I know there has been a lot of discussion lately about FAQs pages and I'm wondering when and if they are still warranted useful and what if they have positive or negative effects on page rankings. Regards, John Brown
Content Development | | JohnBrown75
Essay Writer0 -
At what point to stop comments on a blog? Do too many comments hurt the page?
I have a page that's ranking pretty well, and driving sales. That page is starting to get 10+ comments per day and is starting to get quite long. I was wondering if there is a point where I should disable the comments? My gut tells me that people interacting with the page, and Google seeing responses with the users SHOULD be a good thing not bad. But, then I think that a majority of the content of the page is no longer the article, but the comments. All the comments are good, non spammy and directly related to the topic. People just asking questions, etc. Good engagement, I should be happy right?
Content Development | | DemiGR0 -
Wordpress Overly Dynamic URLs
Moz is giving me an overly dynamic URL warning for around 30 or so of these on our blog. http://blog.domain.com/?page=products&do=domain-com-looks-like-a-blog-title I have no idea what's causing this, we have the permalinks set up for category/post and are running yoast. Anyone have any idea what it is? And how can I stop them being crawled. They link to the blog homepage when clicked, which is set to canonical in the head so it shouldn't do any harm - but i'd like to remove them all the same. Will /Disallow /?=page work in robots.txt?
Content Development | | SolopressPrint0 -
Relaunch - How to find URL's to keep
Hi, During the process of redefining our business I'm planning a relaunch of our website. My goal is to restructure my content and URL structure. I have a lot of non relevant and not ranked content. My question how I can find out the top 10 or top 20 URL's of my actual site that are worth to keep. I'm not familiar with this kind of research... 😞 Thanks in advance
Content Development | | bastelele
Bastian0 -
Google Image Search - How to rank?
Hi, How would you optimise for rank higher in image search? Any tips/rules which need to be applied. Thanks.
Content Development | | Bondara0 -
Page Content?
So I have review pages for websites on my site, each website has a review around 400-500 words. Recently I had my writers write 2 additional articles on each site but about something they have there. My thinking was interlinking them allowing them to rank individually etc. However now after looking around etc.. I see that content that is upwards of 1000 words or more might be more powerful and the way this is all written etc.. I could easily put it all on one page.... So my question is do I go with 3 pages or 1 page. I can see strength in both
Content Development | | dueces0 -
Will using online forum reviews create duplicate content issue?
We are looking at having a text box of 'What customers say' on our product pages using reviews written about us online to remain factual and wanted to know if this will create duplicate content issues? Thanks in advance.
Content Development | | jannkuzel0 -
Root page not coming up first
Hello. Any idea why site:www.bestprice.gr query doesn't bring the www.bestprice.gr as the first result? Could it be that the site is under a penalty? Thanks.
Content Development | | phaistonian0