Most efficient way to change site structure?
-
I would like to change my sites structure to be more efficient for SEO. I have a fear that the changes will have a potential impact on my current rankings, but know this would be a good long term decision.
My site is wordpress, so the changes are relatively easy to make.
What are some ways to change the site structure without damaging your rank? I would have to have to clean up a bunch of errors, so is the best way to simply do 301 redirects on the old pages?
-
Can you offer an example of a couple URLs in your current structure, along with what you plan for your new structure?
Regarding the errors, do you have them now? Or do you believe the change will cause errors?
-
Making solid SEO changes will only have a positive impact in the long run. However there is no magic i'm afraid, and like everything there is a ying and a yang and unfortunately you may see a dip in rankings whilst Google reconfigures itself based on your changes. If your changes are done correctly this should not take too long though.
I would have to have to clean up a bunch of errors, so is the best way to simply do 301 redirects on the old pages?
This really depends on what the errors are?
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
-
Building a product clients will integrate into their sites: What is the best way to utilize my clients' unique domain names?
I'm designing a hosted product my clients will integrate into their websites, their end users would access it via my clients' customer-facing websites. It is a product my clients pay for which provides a service to their end users, who would have to login to my product via a link provided by my clients. Most clients would choose to incorporate this link prominently on their home page and site nav.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | emzeegee
All clients will be in the same vertical market, so their sites will be keyword rich and related to my site.
Many may even be .org and ,edus The way I see it, there are three main ways I could set this up within the product.
I want to know which is most beneficial, or if I'm missing anything. 1: They set up a subdomain at their domain that serves content from my domain product.theirdomain.com would render content from mydomain.com's database.
product.theirdomain.com could have footer and/or other no-follow links to mydomain.com with target keywords The risk I see here is having hundreds of sites with the same target keyword linking back to my domain.
This may be the worst option, as I'm not sure about if the nofollow will help, because I know Google considers this kind of link to be a link scheme: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en 2: They link to a subdomain on mydomain.com from their nav/site
Their nav would include an actual link to product.mydomain.com/theircompanyname
Each client would have a different "theircompanyname" link.
They would decide and/or create their link method (graphic, presence of alt tag, text, what text, etc).
I would have no control aside from requiring them to link to that url on my server. 3: They link to a subdirectory on mydomain.com from their nav/site
Their nav would include an actual link to mydomain.com/product/theircompanyname
Each client would have a different "theircompanyname" link.
They would decide and/or create their link method (graphic, presence of alt tag, text, what text, etc).
I would have no control aside from requiring them to link to that url on my server. In all scenarios, my marketing content would be set up around mydomain.com both as static content and a blog directory, all with SEO attractive url slugs. I'm leaning towards option 3, but would like input!0 -
What's the best way to A/B test new version of your website having different URL structure?
Hi Mozzers, Hope you're doing good. Well, we have a website, up and running for a decent tenure with millions of pages indexed in search engines. We're planning to go live with a new version of it i.e a new experience for our users, some changes in site architecture which includes change in URL structure for existing URLs and introduction of some new URLs as well. Now, my question is, what's the best way to do a A/B test with the new version? We can't launch it for a part of users (say, we'll make it live for 50% of the users, an remaining 50% of the users will see old/existing site only) because the URL structure is changed now and bots will get confused if they start landing on different versions. Will this work if I reduce crawl rate to ZERO during this A/B tenure? How will this impact us from SEO perspective? How will those old to new 301 URL redirects will affect our users? Have you ever faced/handled this kind of scenario? If yes, please share how you handled this along with the impact. If this is something new to you, would love to know your recommendations before taking the final call on this. Note: We're taking care of all existing URLs, properly 301 redirecting them to their newer versions but there are some new URLs which are supported only on newer version (architectural changes I mentioned above), and these URLs aren't backward compatible, can't redirect them to a valid URL on old version.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | _nitman0 -
301 old site to new site?
I have client with an old site - www.bestfamilylawattorney.com - which had a lot of spammy links (and bad rankings). Instead of fixing those issues, we started a new URL - www.berenjifamilylaw.com - with new content and redesign. Should I do a 301 redirect from old to new domain? If the old site was being penalized, would a 301 transfer that penalty? I just want to make sure I don't end up hurting the new site after doing all the work to start fresh. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
E-commerce site structure & link juice: Bouncing off an idea
Hi guys, Question from a new-comer in SEO. Summary of the situation: potential customers are searching for a generic product category (buy mountainbike) more often than a brand in that category (Specialized MTB). And the latter is searched more often than a specific product ('some specific product from Specialized brand'). Both the brand pages and product pages are not ranking good Then would it be a good idea to have the category pages only link to the brand pages? They may show the products, but the links wouldn't pass link juice. I'm not even sure if that is technically possible, but I wanted to figure out the merit first. I'm hoping this would support the brand pages to rank better as they take in more volume. Please do feel free to teach me!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter850 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
How to change a site without loosing ranking .
How to change a site without loosing ranking .I have a WP site for my own company .locally i have good ranking for few keywords .but I decided to change site theme and improve site contents further .but still i am not sure how to change these thing and doing without loosing ranking .expert advices welcome .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Redirect micro-niche site to bigger niche site?
I have a micro niche site that performs reasonably well (page 1 at least) for it's main keywords. It is an exact match domain. To save the ongoing maintenance of a site that gets less than 10 visitors a day, I was thinking of redirecting this micro niche site to a bigger site (a niche site that the micro niche fits into, if that makes sense!) Would I lose rankings because of the power that the EMD provided? Would it be better keeping it there for the backlink it provides to the bigger site (although on the same C Class IP)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BigMiniMan0 -
Press Release Sites
Ok, I am getting a lot of conflicting information about press release sites. i have been doing press release's for a while (mostly manually), I have also tried a few companies that claim to do it well (never do). After the Panda update the PR sites I have been using are just not as effective. Does anyone else have this problem or are there better PR sites that can be recommended.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820