Would changing permalink structure of 7,500 articles be good or bad?
-
Morning everyone,
I'm the tech at a large men's lifestyle publisher and we're currently running the old /year/month/ URL structure in Wordpress.
Now I've read countless articles about pro's and con's of month date vs post type formats (/2016/06/sample-post/ vs /sample-post/) and considering we produce both evergreen and daily news content we're stuck with making a decision.
Currently we receive about 10,000 organic referrals per day (has been stuck at this for 12 months) but considering we have 7,500 articles, have 10 full-time staff and have been around for close to 7 years we think we're underperforming.
Now providing we 301 redirect every old article to the new structure is there any other reason not to do this change?
Any advice would be appreciated.
-
If you are changing the URL of your evergreen content each time you update it and then 301 redirecting the old URL to the new, that could definitely be impacting the organic traffic potential of that content. I would recommend keeping pages at the same URL even after updating them - so it may make sense, for your frequently-updated pages, to move them to a page without the date stamp in the URL so that you're not republishing and moving the page.
-
Great feedback, guys. Thank you.
The articles are mostly news related so there's not a whole lot of reason to keep them, however we tend to have people dig fairly deep into topics such as cars or watches. This content tends to be timeless.
REASON FOR THE INITIAL QUESTION
We have however also seemed to hit a wall with organic traffic. We did think this was perhaps because of having too many articles on the site but we're not too sure.
We get 10k organic referrals per day, everyday. It fluctuates maybe +-100 but it's like it's we're stuck at a ceiling.... hence the reason we're looking at changing link structure to maybe help move this imaginary log jam.
Some of our in-house practices
Old evergreen articles are always being update
URLs updated so date stamp is more recent - then 301 redirect put in place
Major newspapers and high authority websites regularly linking to use for 'expert advice'We seem to be doing everything by the book but something's stopping our growth.... maybe changing all the URLs and the structure may not help.
-
Good question, and you should be aware that recent large scale 301 redirect campaigns have shown a small loss (around 15%) of total link authority.
However, Google has said repeatedly that 301 redirects dilute the same amount of PageRank as it would through a regular link. Matt Cutts said this most recently in a 2013 YouTube video that has a clear discussion on the matter. Basically, what this means is that to Google the "loss in PageRank from 301 redirects is so minimal it's not an issue webmasters should even worry about."
Based on that statement, your next question on a large-scale URL change needs to be NOT SEO-focused, but UX-focused:
- Will the URL change impact your users?
- Will that URL change be a POSITIVE impact for users?
Personally, I think the most important question you need to ask yourself though isn't making the change. But AFTER you make the change can you really justify keeping 7500+ articles?
Let's be honest, are you REALLY sure all 7500 articles are high-quality? We know that even a small amount of thin or low-quality content on a domain can effect the performance of all the content, so maybe a focused content audit needs to be a priority?
Have you reviewed closely the Google Search Console Search Queries information for your articles? Any article on your site that hasn't generate traffic in 28 days is not a "high-quality article." That's the content you'd want to focus on specifically. Can that content be updated, improved and republished? Or is that content better CUT AWAY COMPLETELY from the domain so that other content has a better chance of improvement?
Just something to think about. Hope this was useful. Good luck!
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
-
Google Pagination Changes
What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s). Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first. The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1. I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it? Is there anything I'm missing?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Structure of HTML Page
Hello, Is is true that search engine give more value to some part of the page than other ? Is only the main content considered ? or are the other also given weight but very small weight ? If I have div in the main content as those considered par of the main content or no ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics1 -
AddThis good or bad for SEO - Urgent
I have heard rumours that AddThis isn't good for SEO is that correct? Just thinking about adding it to my site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoman100 -
How good or bad is this for SEO?
I will try to make this as clear as possible. We represent the yellow pages - www.visalietuva.lt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FCRMediaLietuva
For every single company that is listed we have Creditworthiness - that helps to find information about their payment history and their business status. It's pretty useful. An example could be found here: http://www.visalietuva.lt/en/company/dizrega-uab/creditworthiness Some companies that are proud of their result started putting Iframe on their pages:
http://dizrega.lt/lt/kontaktai/firmos-rodikliai We noticed this on Google Webmasters, when new links started to appear.
So we are not sure if this is good for SEO? Of course this is good for our Google Analytics:))
If this is good, maybe we should send offer for our clients, that we can help to put iframe like this for free, for people who are not able to do it themselves. Your opinions please!0 -
Site Structured Navigated by Cookies
Is it advisable to have a site structure that is navigated via URLs rather than cookies? In a website that has several location based pages - each with their own functions and information? Is this a SEO priority? Will it help to combat duplicate content? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us. Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog). We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum. We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to: 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed. Submit new site maps to search engines. Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.). Send out a newsletter to our subscribers. Update our forum members. Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure. Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period? OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains? Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally! Thanks Jay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DWJames0 -
What do you do with outdated news and articles?
What do you guys do with your old content/news/articles? Do you just leave them on your site forever for historical reasons? It goes without saying that you wouldn't delete an article that has links pointing to it. But if there aren't any links, it doesn't rank and it doesn't receive traffic… do you just scrap it? How say you? Update: I would also like to throw in that I have a client who in 2006/2007 used content from another site. What would you do with that content after this amount of time? Bother with it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss0 -
7 years old domain sandboxed for 8 months, wait or make a domain change?
Hello folks The questions is, if a domain, 7 years old being sandboxed due to "notice of unnatural links to website" does it make sense to make a domain change (301 permanent redirect and make a "domain change" under google webmaster tools) to another, aged(!) domain name?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ferray
Website being sandboxed for over 8 months already and there is no chance to do anything with those "unnatural" links to website... Any suggestions?0