After blog URL structure change, should you wait to optimize old posts?
-
Hi all,
I'm changing the URL structure on my site's blog (getting rid of dates) soon, but I'm also working on updating/optimizing a bunch of old posts. Some of these old posts have a good amount of traffic, which I don't want to lose when I redirect the old URLs to the new URLs after restructure. I know that you are more likely to maintain your rank and traffic after a redirect if you keep the page content the exact same.
So my question is -- should I leave the old posts alone (not making any changes) for a couple of weeks after the URL restructure/redirects for Google to index the new URLs and see that the content is the exact same so the pages don't lose any traffic, OR does it not really matter because I am optimizing these posts, meaning that the content will be better and hopefully get ranked higher?
I haven't been able to find a consensus on this, so I'd really appreciate the advice!
Many thanks,
Rebecca
-
Hi Rebecca,
I would say it doesn't matter. The optimised posts will most likely get higher rankings. I very regularly edit and extend posts with up to date info and this is only resulting in better rankings because of the "fresh" content I provide. Best wishes to you too!
Regards, Tymen
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
-
Best way to set up URL structure for reviews off of PDP pages.
We are adding existing customer reviews to Product Detail Pages pages. There are about 300 reviews per product so we're going to have to paginate reviews off of the PDP page. I'm wondering what the best url structure for reviews pages is to get the most seo benefit. For example, would it be something like this? site.com/category/product/reviews/page-1 or something that used parameters, such as: site.com/reviews?product=a Also, what is the best way to show that the internal link on the PDP page to "All Reviews" is a higher priority link than the other links on the page?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | katseo10 -
Will changing category URLs on site hurt SEO?
Hi Moz Community, We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it. Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise. We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu. So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced. My questions are: If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page? Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way? Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow? Thanks so much for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TaraLP1 -
Changing URLs
URLs of my web pages are based on the titles of pages. For sampel, if a title page is called "product ABC", then the URL for this page is /product-abc. Google and all other search engines have indexed all pages. Now I want to change the titles of some sites. Should I change the URLs accordingly, or should I rather leave URLs as they are. SEO Best Practice says that keywords must be placed both in the title, and in the URL. I think that Google will think that pages have douplicate content with diffrent titles, and it comes to many 404 error, if I change the URLs. What do you recommend in this case?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kian_moz0 -
What's the best URL structure?
I'm setting up pages for my client's website and I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. Which of the following would be best (let's say the keywords being used are "sell xgadget" "sell xgadget v1" "sell xgadget v2" "sell xgadget v3" etc.). Domain name: sellgadget.com Potential URL structures: 1. sellxgadget.com/v1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zing-Marketing
2. sellxgadget.com/xgadget-v1
3. sellxgadget.com/sell-xgadget-v1 Which would be the best URL structure? Which has the least risk of being too keyword spammy for an EMD? Any references for this?0 -
Change Media Wiki urls to - instead of _
Is there a way to do this? I have a new wiki set up at http://hiddentriforce.com/zelda-wiki/index.php/Main_Page I want to change the default underscores to hyphens. This is what I have been trying Options +FollowSymLinks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Atomicx
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase / RewriteRule !.(html|php)$ - [S=4]
RewriteRule ^([^]*)([^]*)([^]*)([^]*)(.)$ $1-$2-$3-$4-$5 [E=uscor:Yes]
RewriteRule ^([^_])([^])([^])(.*)$ $1-$2-$3-$4 [E=uscor:Yes]
RewriteRule ^([^])([^])(.*)$ $1-$2-$3 [E=uscor:Yes]
RewriteRule ^([^])_(.)$ $1-$2 [E=uscor:Yes] RewriteCond %{ENV:uscor} ^Yes$
RewriteRule (.*) http://hiddentriforce.com/zelda-wiki/index.php/$1 [R=301,L]0 -
Should /node/ URLs be 301 redirect to Clean URLs
Hi All! We are in the process of migrating to Drupal and I know that I want to block any instance of /node/ URLs with my robots.txt file to prevent search engines from indexing them. My question is, should we set 301 redirects on the /node/ versions of the URLs to redirect to their corresponding "clean" URL, or should the robots.txt blocking and canonical link element be enough? My gut tells me to ask for the 301 redirects, but I just want to hear additional opinions. Thank you! MS
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MargaritaS0 -
Local Offices Optimization
One of my client has offices in 11 different cities and we have a page on the website for each office. I have optimized each page as well as I could for each city. Every on-page aspect I nailed and I even added a unique 100-150 words text and 3 pictures of the offices to each page to make sure Google wouldn't penalize me for having nearly identical pages. Here's one of the page (the Montreal office): http://pierreroy.com/en/offices/bankruptcy-trustee-montreal/ However, even after doing all that, I can't seem to get as many #1 rankings as I think I should. I get outranked by websites not optimizing their page properly... Is it because of inbound links metrics? How do you build links to each office page without spamming? Any advice? Thanks!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | optimumweb0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dignan990