Question on changing URL structures

[ETerika]

We have a lot of "Long URL" errors in moz, and our URLs have no helpful format to them. For example, our blog URLs currently have a date and the title so they end up looking like this: blog/year/month/day/long title that never ends.

If I were to setup a new URL structure using MOZ best practices, can I just make the change going forward and redirect a few high trafficked links to this new structure? Or do I really need to make the change for the website (specifically blog) as a whole to see a positive impact? I know this means there may be an initial drop in traffic which I'd like to avoid.

[seoman10]

Be very careful about changing hierarchy or structure.  It does have an effect on where the pages rank.

Any pages that are ranking well (i.e. position 0 to 5) don't even touch them, in fact anything on the first page I would be slow to alter without very good reason.

Anything that is on the second page or worse you haven't got a lot to lose, so restructuring probably would make sense.

[Seenlyst]

Hey there,

I assume you're using WordPress default permalink structure. If your site is a large blog I would recommend to check out yoast premium plugin which allows you to set up the 301 redirect at once when you change the permalink structure. If it's a small blog you can do that with other free plugins that help set up 301 redirects as well.

[TucsonAZWebDesign]

To get the full benefit of changing the link structure it's probably a good idea to structure the whole thing correctly as opposed to just throwing it on top of the links you have now. As long as you do the redirects right, it should be a smooth process.