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
-
One site, two blogs, URL structure?
I address a two sided market: consumer research and school fundraising. Essentially parents answer research surveys to generate proceeds for their school. My site will have a landing page at www.centiment.co that directs users to two different sub-landing pages, one related to research and one related to school fundraising. I am going to create two blogs and I am wondering if I should run off one installation of wordpress.org or two? The goal here is to optimize SEO. Separate URL paths by topic are clean but they require two installations of wordpress.org www.centiment.co/research/blog www.centiment.co/fundraising/blog If were to use one installation of wordpress it would be www.centiment.co/blog and then I would have a category for fundraising and a category for research. This is a little simpler. My concern is that it will confuse google and damage my SEO given general blog posts about fundraising are far different then those about research. Any suggestions? Again I don't want to compromise my SEO as I'm creating a blog to improve my SEO. Any insights are much appreciated. Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kurtw14
Kurt0 -
Seo for international sites
Hello, I have a question for the group, our main US site- http://www.datacard.com is utilized to move content to other regional sites like http://www.datacard.co.uk/ and http://www.datacard.fr/ and http://www.datacard.com.br/. Anyhow, we essentially have some regional content on those sites, but for ease of maintaining and updating the content we have a company translate this for us and then undergo an in country review for local people in our company to review the content. That being said the meta descriptions, titles, code, everything gets translated to that language. I know there are issue for SEO for these purposes as we get much better rankings with http://www.datacard.com. The regional sites are newer so this could be part of it. We don't have an agency helping us with SEo and i get a lot of questions on what can be done internally for this for regional sites with our current structure. Any tips you have? It would be greatly appreciated! Laura
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lauramrobinson320 -
How is my 301 redirected site stealing rankings from the main site?
Hello, I have a site, drhobelt.com, that 301 redirects to the main site, drhonow.com. Not only is drhobelt.com still indexed, but it recently stole rankings from drhonow.com for "decompression belt" related terms. What could be causing this? How do I reclaim the rankings for drhonow.com? Thanks for reading!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Development site crawled
We just found out our password protected development site has been crawled. We are worried about duplicate content - what are the best steps to take to correct this beyond adding to robots.txt?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EileenCleary0 -
Blog/Shop/Forum site structure - are we right to make these changes?
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us. Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog). We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum. We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to: 301 redirect old URLs to new ones where they have changed. Submit new site maps to search engines. Update old links where we have control (such as forums where we are paid traders etc.). Send out a newsletter to our subscribers. Update our forum members. Fix errors via WMT before and after the re-structure. Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period? OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains? Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally! Thanks Jay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DWJames0 -
Is this site legit?
http://www.gglpls.com/ is this site legit? Submit website to google + directory?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEODinosaur0 -
A Site in Flash to Optimize
Hello, I have to understand if this site www.spacemilanmodels.com.pt can be optimize since the entire website is in flash wich is not good for optimizacion. What do you guys suggest? Recommendations? Is it possible only with link-building? Tks for the help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PedroM0 -
Key page of site not ranking at all
Our site has the largest selection of dog clothes on the Internet. We're been (every so slowly) creeping up in the rankings for the "dog clothes" term, but for some reason only rank for our home page. Even though the home page (and every page on the domain) has links pointing to our specific Dog Clothes page, that page doesn't even rank anywhere when searching Google with "dog clothes site:baxterboo.com". http://www.google.com/webhp?source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&#sclient=psy&hl=en&site=webhp&source=hp&q=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=dog+clothes+site:baxterboo.com&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=f4efcaa1b8c328f Pages 2+ of product results from that page rank, but not the base page. It's not excluded in robots.txt, All on site links to that page use the same URL. That page is loaded with more text that includes the keywords. I don't believe there's duplicated content. What am I missing? Has the page somehow been penalized?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BBPets0