ECommerce Replatforming URL's
-
We are in the process of re-platforming our eCommerce site to Magento 2. For the most part, the majority of site content will remain the same.
Unfortunately on our current platform, we have been inconsistent with the use of .html as a URL suffix. As a result, our category and product pages are half and half -
/stainless-steel-hardware.html
&
/stainless-steel-hardwareWe are considering taking the opportunity to clean up and standardize our URLs. (Drop the .html from all URLs on the new site and 301 redirect these to the same URL without the .html)
Our concern is that many of the .html pages are good categories with strong page rank and I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects. We are debating internally if it really makes sense to take an SEO hit for something is seemingly small as dropping the .html from the URL.
It would be a no-brainer if we were taking the opportunity to change to more SEO friendly natural language URLs. However currently our URL's appear acceptable with the exception of the inconsistent suffix.
Thanks in advance for any insight on how you would approach this!
-
This article may set your mind at ease: https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
PR drop off no longer drops off circa 15% as of early - mid 2016, which has been confirmed by some lovely Google folks (referenced in the above article).
I think that you're only going to benefit (mainly in terms of management), ongoing.
-
...I've read many articles about page rank loss from 301 redirects
You are right that there is a loss of PR from a 301, but it is going to be very small.
In terms of managing the site, long term, you are going to find it much more straight forward to take the route of tidying up.
I have just been through this with a site over almost 2000 pages and we didn't notice any drop in the SERPs at all. However, we did see a few uplifts, but there could have been a few other reasons for this as well.
If you were changing the URL's to try and gain favour with Google by having more friendly URL's, I would tell you not to bother. This, however, seems like a worthwhile change.
-Andy
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
-
What's the best way to use redirects on a massive site consolidation
We are migrating 13 websites into a single new domain and with that we have certain pages that will be terminated or moved to a new folder path so we need custom 301 redirects built for these. However, we have a huge database of pages that will NOT be changing folder paths and it's way too many to write custom 301's for. One idea was to use domain forwarding or a wild card redirect so that all the pages would be redirected to their same folder path on the new URL. The problem this creates though is that we would then need to build the custom 301s for content that is moving to a new folder path, hence creating 2 redirects on these pages (one for the domain forwarding, and then a second for the custom 301 pointing to a new folder). Any ideas on a better solution to this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MJTrevens0 -
Should I better noindex 'scripted' files in our portfolio?
Hello Moz community, As a means of a portfolio, we upload these PowerPoint exports – which are converted into HTML5 to maintain interactivity and animations. Works pretty nicely! We link to these exported files from our products pages. (We are a presentation design company, so they're pretty relevant). For example: https://www.bentopresentaties.nl/wp-content/portfolio/ecar/index.html However, they keep coming up in the Crawl warnings, as the exported HTML-file doesn't contain text (just code), so we get errors in: thin content no H1 missing meta description missing canonical tag I could manually add the last two, but the first warnings are just unsolvable. Therefore I figured we probably better noindex all these files… They appear to don't contain any searchable content and even then; the content of our clients work is not relevant for our search terms etc. They're mere examples, just in the form of HTML files. Am I missing something or should I better noindex these/such files? (And if so: is there a way to include a whole directory to noindex automatically, so I don't have to manually 'fix' all the HTML exports with a noindex tag in the future? I read that using disallow in robots.txt wouldn't work, as we will still link to these files as portfolio examples).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BentoPres0 -
Is Content Location Determined by Source Code or Visual Location in Search Engine's Mind?
I have a page with 2 scroll features. First 1/3 of the page (from left) has thumb pictures (not original content) and a vertical scroll next to. Remaining 2/3 of the page has a lot of unique content and a vertical scroll next to it. Question: Visually on a computer, the unique content is right next to the thumbs, but in the source code the original content shows after these thumbs. Does that mean search engines will see this content as "below the fold" and actually, placing this content below the thumbs (requiring a lot of scrolling to get to the original content) would in a search engine's mind be the exact same location of the content, as the source code shows the same location? I am trying to understand if search engines base their analysis on source code or also visual location of content? thx
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Chinese Sites Linking With Bizarre Keywords Creating 404's
Just ran a link profile, and have noticed for the first time many spammy Chinese sites linking to my site with spammy keywords such as "Buy Nike" or "Get Viagra". Making matters worse, they're linking to pages that are creating 404's. Can anybody explain what's going on, and what I can do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alrockn0 -
How much risk would there be with this 'repeating of a sentence' situation?
Hello, A business owner and design decision was made on a published article page to have a summary sentence/paragraph placed prominently with a unique font treatment in the article header along with the article's main imagery. Historical content that does not have this summary migrated with "the first sentence of the article" used for this introduction/summary sentence/paragraph. In both cases, where there is a unique summary and where the first sentence is used, the article text normally begins below a graphical element below the summary element. Thus, when the first sentence was used for the summary, the first sentence will repeat, relatively close together on each page where this happens. The question is: How much risk would i be taking on in allowing the first sentence of these articles to get repeated in close proximity on the page. I wanted to get some other perspectives on this unique situation. Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JennyTTGT0 -
How to check a website's architecture?
Hello everyone, I am an SEO analyst - a good one - but I am weak in technical aspects. I do not know any programming and only a little HTML. I know this is a major weakness for an SEO so my first request to you all is to guide me how to learn HTML and some basic PHP programming. Secondly... about the topic of this particular question - I know that a website should have a flat architecture... but I do not know how to find out if a website's architecture is flat or not, good or bad. Please help me out on this... I would be obliged. Eagerly awaiting your responses, BEst Regards, Talha
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MTalhaImtiaz0 -
Hundreds of thousands of 404's on expired listings - issue.
Hey guys, We have a conundrum, with a large E-Commerce site we operate. Classified listings older than 45 days are throwing up 404's - hundreds of thousands, maybe millions. Note that Webmaster Tools peaks at 100,000. Many of these listings receive links. Classified listings that are less than 45 days show other possible products to buy based on an algorithm. It is not possible for Google to crawl expired listings pages from within our site. They are indexed because they were crawled before they expired, which means that many of them show in search results. -> My thought at this stage, for usability reasons, is to replace the 404's with content - other product suggestions, and add a meta noindex in order to help our crawl equity, and get the pages we really want to be indexed prioritised. -> Another consideration is to 301 from each expired listing to the category heirarchy to pass possible link juice. But we feel that as many of these listings are findable in Google, it is not a great user experience. -> Or, shall we just leave them as 404's? : google sort of says it's ok Very curious on your opinions, and how you would handle this. Cheers, Croozie. P.S I have read other Q & A's regarding this, but given our large volumes and situation, thought it was worth asking as I'm not satisfied that solutions offered would match our needs.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sichristie0 -
URL Length or Exact Breadcrumb Navigation URL? What's More Important
Basically my question is as follows, what's better: www.romancingdiamonds.com/gemstone-rings/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (this would fully match the breadcrumbs). or www.romancingdiamonds.com/amethyst-rings/purple-amethyst-ring-14k-white-gold (cutting out the first level folder to keep the url shorter and the important keywords are closer to the root domain). In this question http://www.seomoz.org/qa/discuss/37982/url-length-vs-url-keywords I was consulted to drop a folder in my url because it may be to long. That's why I'm hesitant to keep the bradcrumb structure the same. To the best of your knowldege do you think it's best to drop a folder in the URL to keep it shorter and sweeter, or to have a longer URL and have it match the breadcrumb structure? Please advise, Shawn
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Romancing0