Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Mass URL changes and redirecting those old URLS to the new. What is SEO Risk and best practices?
-
Hello good people of the MOZ community,
I am looking to do a mass edit of URLS on content pages within our sites. The way these were initially setup was to be unique by having the date in the URL which was a few years ago and can make evergreen content now seem dated. The new URLS would follow a better folder path style naming convention and would be way better URLS overall.
Some examples of the **old **URLS would be
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-9-17-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates/buying-guide-11-13-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates/buying-guide-9-3-2012,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates/buying-guide-7-19-2012,default,pg.htmlThe new URLS would look like this which would be a great improvement
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Kids-Inline-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Inline-Hockey-Skates,default,pg.html
https://www.inlineskates.com/Learn/Buying-Guide-for-Aggressive-Skates,default,pg.htmlMy worry is that we do rank fairly well organically for some of the content and don't want to anger the google machine.
The way I would be doing the process would be to edit the URLS to the new layout, then do the redirect for them and push live.
Is there a great SEO risk to doing this?
Is there a way to do a mass "Fetch as googlebot" to reindex these if I do say 50 a day? I only see the ability to do 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend.
Is there anything else I am missing?I believe this change would overall be good in the long run but do not want to take a huge hit initially by doing something incorrectly. This would be done on 5- to a couple hundred links across various sites I manage.
Thanks in advance,
Chris Gorski -
Hey K.
Happy you found value in everyone's response here.
For your URL, I see your structure resemble a blog structure with your subfolder being "learn" instead of "blog". So if it is, your final URL that you described is fine (learn/buying-guide-for-inline-skates).
As a counterpoint, if you had this content as a hub page (some form of content pillar/topic cluster) for example, it would've been a good possibility to just change the URL structure since you have many Buying Guides. Different types of content, different ways to put it on your site.
Like so: /buying-guide/inline-skatesAt the end of the day, the structure needs to be logical and reflective of where your content is. I think you got it right anyway.
For the execution part;
- I would not recommend using the "crawl as Googlebot" function in search console. It would be way too time-consuming for you, and it is not really designed for that kind of work.
- Instead, update your sitemap with the final URLs and send it again via SearchConsole / Bing Webmastertools.
- Also, don't forget to go ahead and change the internal links pointing to the old URL to point directly to the new ones or else you'll just have a bunch of 301's crawled by Google. Make it seamless.
- Monitor. Monitor. Monitor.
Hope that helped!
-
Thanks all the for responses and I am taking to heart all your suggestions. I will make all the URLs lowercase as this is something I didn't take into account.
Due to site hosting platform limitation for the URL structure I need to have a value in the bold areas below:
https://www.inlineskates.com/learn/buying-guide-for-inline-skates,default,pg.html
The first value "learn" doesn't have to be unique but the 2nd "learn/buying-guide-for-inline-skates" is the driver for the URL and must be unique, so the short URL like https://www.inlineskates.com/buying-guide/Inline-Skates,default,pg.html wouldn't work since I would only be able to use it 1x for inline skates and have several content pieces that I would need to add that to, size guides, charts, etc.
My main concern is about the process of doing the redirects, say I do 50 in one day, what is my next step? Is there a way to run the fetch as googlebot to a handful of pages as I only see the ability to add 1 URL at a time in the webmaster backend. If I go ahead and do this I just want to do it in the smartest way possible.
Thanks, Chris
-
And to add to that, Moz has a great resource on how to write them (emphasis mine);
-
Keeping URLs as simple, relevant, compelling, and accurate as possible is key to getting both your users and search engines to understand them.
-
URLs should be definitive but concise.
-
When necessary for readability, use hyphens to separate words. URLs should not use underscores, spaces, or any other characters to separate words.
-
Use lowercase letters. In some cases, uppercase letters can cause issues with duplicate pages.
-
Avoid the use of URL parameters, if possible, as they can create issues with tracking and duplicate content. If parameters need to be used (UTM codes, e.g.), use them sparingly.
Source - https://moz.com/learn/seo/url
-
-
The new URLs seem pretty verbose.
If this was my site, I would consider...
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Inline-Skates/
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Kids-Inline-Skates/
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Inline-Hockey-Skates/
https://www.inlineskates.com/Buying-Guide/Aggressive-Skates/My breadcrumbs would look similar....
Home >> Buying Guide >> Inline Skates
-
I've heard recent claims that you no longer lose link juice when 301ing, but I've also had personal experience with taking a hit to organic traffic when doing this type of major URL restructuring. You're right, in the long run, it does pay off, but you're also right that there may be a ding in the short term.
While you're in there, I would highly, highly recommend taking the additional step of removing ",default,pg" from your URLs. There are two problems with that string - one is it contains commas, which can be problematic. Anything other than plain text and hyphens is generally discouraged in URLs. The other problem is that "default pg" part is watering down your URL and does not contribute to making the links short and easy to type and understand for humans. Since you are undertaking such a massive restructuring, now is the time to make these additional tweaks - as it's less painful to do All The Things at once and take one hit, than it would be to take a hit now and another hit later when you tackle that separately. I personally also always use only lowercase characters in my URLs as it's easier to type and depending on the server OS improper capitalization may make it so they don't reach the right page, but that is more of a UX preference than an SEO enhancement.
Another couple of tips: I find it extremely helpful to map everything out on a spreadsheet in this type of migration. Helps me make sure I have the old and the new mapped out, and also helps to have a checklist to go through systematically. I also tend to group related pages in batches, as presumably related pages will be linked to each other, and once Google comes crawling back over one page it will see the new URLs and crawl those too, faster than it would crawl unrelated pages. Finally, use a HTTP header check tool (google that and you'll find several) after you add the redirects just to make 100% certain you've set everything up correctly. And where possible, mass-redirect in a single .htaccess rule rather than one by one.
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
-
Sitemaps: Best Practice
What should and what shouldn't go in the sitemap? In particular, pages like subscribe to our newsletter/ unsubscribe to our newsletter? Is there really any benefit in highlighting those pages to the SEs? Thanks for any advice/ anecdotes 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Fubra0 -
Does changing template for a wordpress site affect SEO
Hi I work for an Inventory Management Software company and we already have a WordPress site but I am currently working on re-designing of our WordPress site and in this process, we are looking for moving to a new template. I want to know what will be the impact on SEO performance while taking a shift to a new template.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cin7_Marketing0 -
301 Redirects to relative URLs not absolute a problem?
Hi we recently did a migration and a lot of content changed locations see: https://d.pr/i/RvqI81 Basically, the 301 goes to the correct location but its a relative URL (as you can see from the screenshot) rather than absolute URL. Do you think this is a high priority issue from an SEO standpoint, should we get the developer to change the redirects to absolute? Cheers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cathywix0 -
SEO Best Practices regarding Robots.txt disallow
I cannot find hard and fast direction about the following issue: It looks like the Robots.txt file on my server has been set up to disallow "account" and "search" pages within my site, so I am receiving warnings from the Google Search console that URLs are being blocked by Robots.txt. (Disallow: /Account/ and Disallow: /?search=). Do you recommend unblocking these URLs? I'm getting a warning that over 18,000 Urls are blocked by robots.txt. ("Sitemap contains urls which are blocked by robots.txt"). Seems that I wouldn't want that many urls blocked. ? Thank you!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamiegriz0 -
Can you redirect specific sub domain URLs?
ello! We host our PDFs, Images, CSS all in a sub domain. For the question, let's call this sub.cyto.com. I've noticed a particular PDF doing really well, infact it has gathered valuable external links from high authoritative sites. To top it off, it gets good visits. I've been going back and forth with our developers to move this PDF to a subfolder structure.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs
For example: www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf In my perspective, if I move this and set up a permanent redirect, then all the external links the PDF gathered, link juice and future visits will be attributed to the main website. Since the PDF is existing in the subdomain, I can't even track direct visits nor get the link juice. It appears in top position of Google as well. My developer says it is better to keep images, pdf, css in the subdomain. I see his point and an idea I have is to: convert the pdf to a webpage. Set up a 301 redirect from the existing subdomain to this webpage Upload the pdf with a new name and link to it from the webpage, so users can download if they choose to. This should give me the existing rank juice. However, my question is whether you can set up a 301 redirect for just a single subdomain URL to a folder structure URL? sub.cyto.com/xxx.pdf to www.cyto.com/document/xxxx.pdf?0 -
Merging Sites: Will redirecting the old homepage to an internal page on the new site cause issues?
I've ended up with two sites which have similar content (but not duplicate) and target similar keywords, rather than trying to maintain two sites I would like to merge the sites together. The old site is more of a traditional niche site and targets a particular set of keywords on its homepage, the new site is more of an authority site with a magazine type homepage and targets the same set of keywords from an internal page. My question is: Should I redirect the old site's homepage to the relevant internal page on the new website...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lara_dar
...or should I redirect the old site's homepage to the new site's homepage? (the old site's homepage backlinks are a mixture of partial match keyword anchor text, naked URLs and branded anchor text) I am in two minds (a & b!) (a) Redirecting to the internal page would be great for ranking as there are some decent backlinks and the content is similar (b) But usually when you do a 301 redirect the homepage usually directs to the new homepage and some of the old site's links are related to the domain rather than the keyword (e.g. http://www.site.com) and some people will be looking for the site's homepage. What do you think? Your help is much appreciated (and hope this makes sense...!)0 -
What is the best way to handle special characters in URLs
What is the best way to handle special characters? We have some URL's that use special characters and when a sitemap is generate using Xenu it changes the characters to something different. Do we need to have physically change the URL back to display the correct character? Example: URL: http://petstreetmall.com/Feeding-&-Watering/361.html Sitmap Link: http://www.petstreetmall.com/Feeding-%26-Watering/361.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WebRiverGroup0 -
Changing a parent category and 301 redirecting
I have a set of three pages that are subpages of a parent. The structure is as follows: mysite.com/directory/personal-widgets mysite.com/directory/commercial-widgets mysite.com/directory/widgets-services The partent page name "directory" really isn't working for where I want these pages to evolve. So I want to change it to "guides" In a world without worrying about google, I would simply change the parent page to guides, so they look like this, and be done with it: mysite.com/guides/personal-widgets But, the obvious problem is that I have external links to the page now. And the pages have a nice PR. And they also have Facebook page Likes and I don't know if I'll lose those. I know that if I should do this I should redirect the pages to the new pages of course. My question is: Will redirecting the old URL to the new URL with a 301 cause anything negative to happen that I might not be expecting? Does Google dislike Redirects for any reason, or understand they are sometimes necessary?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bizzer0