Changing url (permalink) structure of website??
-
Currently I'm working on SEO of one website www.mocomi.com. I want to change url (permalink) structure of entire website which has more than 5000 pages.
Currently website have structure of http://mocomi.com/tenali-raman-the-kings-condition/
Which I want to change it to http://mocomi.com/fun/stories/tenali-raman/tenali-raman-the-kings-condition/
Likewise I want to change entire website permalink url structure to make site architecture more SEO friendly.
Which means I'am going to add only categories & subcategories before actual link.
Kindly guide with following questions which I need to move forward with this step.
How much is it worth to change URL structure?
Checklist or factors I need to consider while making this decision?
Is it a good practice to change URL's of entire website at once or Should I change it in Parts?
How much time it takes google to rank those urls again?
Which are the best practices to do so?
-
I agree with everyone above. A great tool for this may be SEO Yoast Premium. When you create categories that changes your permalink structure it automatically creates a 301 redirect for each page.
-
I recently did this with our site of a similar size. We had some categorized posts and a lot of date-based posts (like /issues/cwa/archives/2016/02/post-title) and we moved everything to new categories. We changed our domain name as well, which was an additional issue.
We did it all at once. The month we made the change we had about a 15% dip in organic traffic, which slowly grew the following month. By the next month (so starting about 60 days after the change) traffic was up 30% over our pre-change levels.
Now, not quite a year later, we are up 65% over our pre-change levels and still growing (even though there is still more work to be done). So for me, it was well worth it.
My biggest challenge was making sure that I had a careful and comprehensive 301 redirect table to share with the developers—it was a lot of content to categorize. I started with the pages that had the most traffic/conversions and went from there. I still had quite a few pages that were just brought along for the ride (they were outdated and had little traffic), which I just redirected into a general category. I am going through those bit by bit, updating, redirecting, removing as appropriate.
It's a big job, but it can be very rewarding!
-
I agree with Ramon in terms of changing the links. However, I'm not sure that the change you want to make will have the best impact. For example, http://mocomi.com/who-invented-zero/. This link is very easy to share, very easy to recognize and it is easy to index for the specific question. Moreover, "math for kids" is included in the title which is good. The place I think you need to work more is the specific category. In this case you have http://mocomi.com/learn/maths/. Why is "kids" not appearing anywhere here? What I want to suggest is that you need to conduct a keyword research first before making your changes. You need to pinpoint exactly WHAT you have to change and you need to know for sure WHY you want to do a specific change. Hope this helps.
-
Hi Jesh Krisna Murthy ,
To answer your questions:
-
As your site has lots of content in the different categories it makes a lot of sense to add these to the url structure. They will help users and crawlers understand how your site is laid out. They will also add relevant keywords to the urls which could benefit your rankings.
-
For doing this kind of a change you should analyse the following:
-
the work involved in doing this change (how easy is it to change this in your cms? in some cms´s like wordpress this change is pretty easy)
-
the work in the additional setup of the 301 redirects you need to send people landing on your old page to the new page and to pass on any link equity of those old pages.
-
Work involved in updating your internal links to these pages.
-
update and resubmit your sitemaps.
-
I would do this change all at once, though it effects many categories,it is only one change. And it could be more of an effort to try and split it up. If you want to be extra cautious though you could do this by category
-
When you have done this change correctly and submitted new sitemap to search engines this shouldn´t take to long for Google to pick up. I have seen 1-2 weeks and sometimes a bit more. And as you have setup correct 301´s you shouldn´t have to worry about this.
Hope this helps you.
regards
-
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
-
URL Structure Category Pages -Current Moz Friday-
Hello,
On-Page Optimization | | _Heiko_
regarding #15 of the last moz friday I have a question: http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls What would you prefer if the lenght of the URL will be still under 60 characters and you have an example like this: Let's call it a specific page in a category. As I like the old shoe examples: You have a page about red shoes in your shoe category. Which URL would you prefer: a) www.mydomain.com/shoes/red-shoe b) www.mydomain.com/shoes/red Personally I would prefer a) or would you already consider this as spammy? My real example is not that trivial like the shoe example and the categories will be in plural and the specific pages always in singular (like in the example shoes vs shoe). c) would be to put it independently from the side structure on www.mydomain.com/red-shoe - but personally I have the experience that a) or b) will help the rankings of the category page if you have the specific pages in the same subfolder. What's your opinion on this?1 -
Duplicate Content on our own website
Our website sells tickets for events. We also have an news articles section with information about events / artists / venues. From time to time we release a product page and a related news article on a separate page. Some of the content in the news article would be perfect for our product page. Essentially its our product page we want too rank. Would it harm our SEO if we had some of the same content on both of these pages?
On-Page Optimization | | Alexogilvie0 -
Long URL's
So I'm super new at SEO and learning a lot. I'm a small business owner and enjoy doing it myself. Are long URL's good or bad? Like this: http://www.farnorthkennel.com/german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls/long-haired-german-shepherd-puppies-lava Is that too long? The german-shepherd-puppies-the-girls is an actual page with actual content. Do those hurt me?
On-Page Optimization | | Joshlaska0 -
Website Changes Updated in Google...
How long does it take for Google to recognize SEO changes that I have made to my website?
On-Page Optimization | | AubbiefromAubenRealty0 -
Site structure suggestions/feedback
I asked this on Reddit and got some some decent answers. I'm curious to see what the pro's of SEOmoz think. I've got a lead generation site for forklift parts--liftxparts.com. You can think of it similar to car parts, where we have sections for specific brands (e.x. Toyota forklift parts) and sections for specific categories (e.x. forklift filters). Right now, the site is structured in two main levels: the top level is a dozen or so brands (separate pages for Toyota forklift parts, Clark forklift parts, etc), and then the second level is the categories (separate pages for a dozen or so different categories like forklift filters, forklift engine parts, etc.).If you check out one of the pages, like Clark forklift parts for example (our top landing page)--liftxparts.com/clark-forklift-parts.html, you'll see that on the brand pages (they're all structured the same), we list all the different categories (with links to the same second level category pages) and "search" buttons. All pages point to the same lead capture form.This has been working pretty well--about 90% of visitors end up on our lead capture form, and a high percentage of those convert. We're working on increasing organic traffic now and I'm thinking our structure could use some improvement.Looking at the analytics, there are a lot more impressions for keywords like "clark forklift" than "clark forklift parts". One gap I've uncovered is while our average position, and by extension CTR and traffic, for phrases like "clark forklift parts" is quite good, it's not so good for broader and higher searched terms like "clark forklift". Should we add another level of hierarchy targeted to just general brands? So now we have content for clark forklift parts, but should we add a page for terms like "clark forklift"? Or should we just add some broader content to the existing brand pages? The pages are quite long already, I'm afraid adding more content to the bottom of the page isn't very functional. Our thinking is that we can increase average position for higher searched terms by adding content targeted to those terms. The question is how exactly to go about it and how to work it into our current site structure? Any feedback related to our site structure or even just related ideas about other ways to approach our goal of increasing organic traffic would be very much appreciated! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | wisamabdulla0 -
Changing url in connection with meta title inconsistency
We run a site, which is a directory type one, where visitors can look for local businesses per city as well (at some point similar to the 'Yelp concept'). Now, we use www.example.com as the homepage, and the www.example.com/city1, where city1 is the capital of our country, is 301 redirected to the homepage, so this is your default setting. When you choose e.g city2, your url changes to www.example.com/city2, and the city value is stored in a cookie. Then, when you leave the session, and return to the site later on, you will see the homepage url, but with your previous choice of city (in case you let cookies be stored). My concern is, that the meta title always contains the chosen city name, so when you return to the website, and you previously used city2, you will now see the homepage url (which normally belongs to city1), but with the meta title of city2 or with any other previously chosen city. Does this mean a problem, and should I always use the correct url, which would be www.example.com/cityX, or this could not cause a problem for me? If it does, would you mind sharing me the exact problems as well? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
Does having a "+" in a URL hurt SEO? Would much value be gained changing it to a hyphen?
There's a site that contains "+" signs in the URL in order to call different information for the content on the page. Would it be better to change those to hyphens (-), or not that much value will be gained, so leave them as is? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MitchellStoker0