When is it worth re-structuring your site?
-
I recently started working on a site that is 8 years old and the currently URLs/ site structure is not SEO friendly. We are concerned that in re-structuring the site, we may loose our rankings.
Has anyone ever completely re-structured their site? Was it worth it?
-
So, basically, we are thinking of putting all content related to one keyword in a subdirectory. Currently all content is in one main subdirectory. For example, url.com/un-related-subdirectory/tons of content to url.com/keyword/content-related-to-this-keyword.
-
If all you are doing is creating a different architecture without making significant changes to the actual content (so giving each existing page a more SEO friendly category +/or file name) then you just need to make sure that every individual page is correctly redirected to its new URL using 301's. External links will remain in play and search engines will eventually recognize the redirects and update their indexes.
As long as you build the new structure in parallel so that you never take a page out of circulation you should be good.
If, on the other hand, you plan on altering content, removing pages completely, or doing something that will make existing pages unavailable for any period of time, you are likely to see some impact on rankings that might not be ideal.
If your concern stems from the fact that you are maybe not sure whether the new structure will actually help, then you will want to start slowly as Nicholas suggested.
My approach would be to do exactly as Nicholas described, but to start with pages that are ranking poorly.
Happy 301'ing
-
I have a similar problem with a client of mine.
While I feel on paper, their on-site SEO is below par. They are consistently ranking #1 and #2 for their keywords.The one thing I have done was come up with a plan and structured it out in excel and word, just in case a large problem occurs.
The best solution would be to write out your proposed changes, and start small. If you start small and structure your plan in a timeline, you can re-structure the whole site over a long period of time without seeing any negative effects initially.
-
This can be a worth while venture, but only as a last resort.
In order to make a better informed response or suggestion, more information would be required of you......is the site for making $ or just for fun, how competive is the environment, would the capital time and investment work out if you sharpend a pencil to it.
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
-
Transferring Domain and redirecting old site to new site and Having Issues - Please help
I have just completed a site redesign under a different domain and new wordpress woo commerce platform. The typical protocol is to just submit all the redirects via the .htaccess file on the current site and thereby tell google the new home of all your current pages on the new site so you maintain your link juice. This problem is my current site is hosted with network solutions and they do not allow access to the .htaccess file and there is no way to redirect the pages they say other than a script they can employ to push all pages of the old site to the new home page of the new site. This is of course bad for seo so not a solution. They did mention they could also write a script for the home page to redirect just it to the new home page then place a script of every individual page redirecting each of those. Does this sound like something plausible? Noone at network solutions has really been able to give me a straight answer. That being said i have discussed with a few developers and they mentioned a workaround process to avoid the above: “The only thing I can think of is.. point both domains (www.islesurfboards.com & www.islesurfandsup.com) to the new store, and 301 there? If you kept WooCommerce, Wordpress has plugins to 301 pages. So maybe use A record or CName for the old URL to the new URL/IP, then use htaccess to redirect the old domain to the new domain, then when that comes through to the new store, setup 301's there for pages? Example ... http://www.islesurfboards.com points to http://www.islesurfandsup.com ... then when the site sees http://www.islesurfboards.com, htaccess 301's to http://www.islesurfandsup.com.. then wordpress uses 301 plugin for the pages? Not 100% sure if this is the best way... but might work." Can anyone confirm this process will work or suggest anything else to redirect my current site on network solutions to my new site withe new domain and maintain the redirects and seo power. My domain www.islesurfboards.com has been around for 10 years so dont just want to flush the link juice down the toilet and want to redirect everything correctly.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isle_surf0 -
Merging Niche Site
I posted a question about this a while ago, but still haven't pulled the trigger. I have a main site (bobsclothing.com). I also have a EM niche site (i.e shirtsmall.com). It would be more efficient for me to merge these site, because: I would have to manage content, promos, etc. on a single site. In other words, I can focus efforts on 1 site. If I am writing content, I don't have to split the work. I don't have to worry about duplicate content. Right now, if I enter a product URL into copyscape, the other sites is returned for many products. What makes me apprehensive are: The niche site actually ranks for more keywords than the main site, although it has lower revenue. Slightly lower PA, and DA. Niche site ranks top 20 for a profitable keyword that has about 1300 exact match searches. If you include the longer tail versions of the keyword it would be more. If I merge these sites, and do proper 301s (product to product, category to category) how likely is it that main site will still rank for that keyword? Am I likely to end up with a site that has stronger DA? Am I better off keeping the niche site and just focusing content efforts on the few keywords that it can rank well for? I appreciate any advice. If someone has done this, please share your experience. TIA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inhouseseo0 -
Site Structured Navigated by Cookies
Is it advisable to have a site structure that is navigated via URLs rather than cookies? In a website that has several location based pages - each with their own functions and information? Is this a SEO priority? Will it help to combat duplicate content? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Real Estate Site Question
I'm working on this site: www.aldodavico.com - who is a real estate agent in Miami. Any ideas/best practices for SEO for a site like this one? It's got about 500 pages. I've never deal with such a huge site before.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Question about best approach to site structure
I am curious if anyone can share some advice. I am working on planning architecture for a tour company. The key piece of the content strategy will be providing details on each of the tour destinations, with associated profiles for each city within those destinations. Lots of content, which should be great for the SEO strategy. With regards to the architecture, I have a ‘destinations’ section on the Website where users can access each of the key destinations served by the tour company. My question is – from a planning perspective I can organize my folder structure in a few different ways. http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/touring-regions/cities/ or http://www.companyurl.com/destinations/ http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionA/ http://www.companyurl.com/touring-regionB/cities-profile/ I am curious if anyone has an opinion on what might perform best in terms of the site structure from an SEO perspective. My fear is taking all of this rich content and placing it so many tiers down in the architecture of the site. Any advice that could be offered would be appreciated. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VERBInteractive0 -
Noindex a meta refresh site
I have a client's site that is a vanity URL, i.e. www.example.com, that is setup as a meta refresh to the client's flagship site: www22.example.com, however we have been seeing Google include the Vanity URL in the index, in some cases ahead of the flagship site. What we'd like to do is to de-index that vanity URL. We have included a no-index meta tag to the vanity URL, however we noticed within 24 hours, actually less, the flagship site also went away as well. When we removed the noindex, both vanity and flagship sites came back. We noticed in Google Webmaster that the flagship site's robots.txt file was corrupt and was also in need of fixing, and we are in process of fixing that - Question: Is there a way to noindex vanity URL and NOT flagship site? Was it due to meta refresh redirect that the noindex moved out the flagship as well? Was it maybe due to my conducting a google fetch and then submitting the flagship home page that the site reappeared? The robots.txt is still not corrected, so we don't believe that's tied in here. To add to the additional complexity, the client is UNABLE to employ a 301 redirect, which was what I recommended initially. Anyone have any thoughts at all, MUCH appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ACNINTERACTIVE0 -
Our Site's Content on a Third Party Site--Best Practices?
One of our clients wants to use about 200 of our articles on their site, and they're hoping to get some SEO benefit from using this content. I know standard best practices is to canonicalize their pages to our pages, but then they wouldn't get any benefit--since a canonical tag will effectively de-index the content from their site. Our thoughts so far: add a paragraph of original content to our content link to our site as the original source (to help mitigate the risk of our site getting hit by any penalties) What are your thoughts on this? Do you think adding a paragraph of original content will matter much? Do you think our site will be free of penalty since we were the first place to publish the content and there will be a link back to our site? They are really pushing for not using a canonical--so this isn't an option. What would you do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline1 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0