SEO Strategy for URL Change
-
I'm working with a company who will likely have to change their URL because of a trademark dispute. They will be able to maintain the new URL for some period but will soon need to drop the existing URL all together.
Aside from the usual keyword considerations when choosing a URL, are there any SEO strategies I should consider as we execute this change?
-
Hi,
This video from Matt Cutts talks about how Google will best handle the 301's and how long it might take.
If the site is large and database driven, then using database lookups to generate your 301's would probably be the best solution. Long lists of 301's have a potential to create processing issues - not to mention the pain associated with having to create them!
I would also do the work to at least attempt to get external sites to change any existing links. Given the legal ramifications, I would not want to leave any anchor text out there for the other party to take issue with if I could avoid it. (I would also keep a detailed record of all the work done in this area, just in case there is any kind of legal challenge).
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
A couple of obvious ones that folks sometimes forget:
1. Update your XML sitemaps and resubmit to webmaster tools through Google, Bing, etc.
2. Update all your internal links! (This one can be a pain in the...)
Best of luck!
W
-
I hope someone corrects me if im wrong on this but I believe 6 months will be more than enough time for the passed data to go through google. That being said after the 6 months you'll lose and juice from the links going to the domain currently. are there significant website linking to it now and could you contact those websites with an updated URL?
-
I'll be able to setup a 301 for a period of time (6 months or so), but eventually they'll lose it all together.
-
Will you be able to 301 the URL or will you have to lose it all together? if you 301 everything should be fine.
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
-
Can you combine YouTube and on-site hosting as part of a Video SEO strategy?
My question is sparked by how Moz uses its Whiteboard Friday videos. We are currently capturing video stories from our customers. Its excellent and engaging content we'd love to share with a wider audience. I'm puttting together a strategy for video SEO to drive traffic to our site and Moz's approach intrigues me. As we know, the world of video rich snippets changed in 2014 - their appearance in universal search reduced dramatically and what remained was almost entirely (90%+) YouTube snippets. Useless if you're looking to drive traffic to your own site. Of course, it's still possible to earn SERPs for video in Google video search, but I imagine the search volume is greatly reduced. From what I can see, first Moz host their Whiteboard Friday video on Wistia, complete with transcript and whiteboard capture. Suprisingly, I see no Schema markup for video. Can anyone shed a light as to why this might be a good idea? 3-6 months later the same video is then uploaded to youtube, with the same title and a similar description. The end result is multiple SERPs in universal search, almost always in the following order: the original post on Moz a YouTube result complete with a video rich sippet This has me asking the following questions - I have some theories - but i'd love your input: Why use two platforms to upload and host the video? Why not just YouTube? Why avoid using Schema on the Wistia video hosted on the original post? Surely, this would allow an additional result in Google Video Search? Why wait 3-6 months after the first post to upload the YouTube video?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobertChapman0 -
Duplicate content with URLs
Hi all, Do you think that is possible to have duplicate content issues because we provide a unique image with 5 different URLs ? In the HTML code pages, just one URL is provide. It's enough for that Google don't see the other URLs or not ? Example, in this article : http://www.parismatch.com/People/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112 The same image is available on: http://cdn-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize1-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize2-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg http://resize3-parismatch.ladmedia.fr/img/var/news/storage/images/paris-match/people/kim-kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix-1092112/15629236-1-fre-FR/Kim-Kardashian-sa-securite-n-a-pas-de-prix.jpg Thank you very much for your help. Julien
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Julien.Ferras0 -
SEO penalty for changing domains by simply switching DNS on Wordpress and adding 301s server-side?
Working on a domain change for a client. They're hosted on Wordpress and their developer wants to simply switch out the DNS for the new domain to point to wordpress, and then have the old domain use 301s to redirect to the new domain. The url structure will be the same, but there will be no CMS connected to the old domain after the switch. Is this dangerous for SEO? A significant portion of their customers are from organic traffic and losing SEO value would be very bad.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dfolwell0 -
Changing Brand and Domain Name - SEO Impacts
Hi everyone I'm hoping a few of you can help me out... We're an online-one retailer and we're currently looking at rebranding.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | piazza
This is for commercial reasons: Our current name is difficult for customers to spell It's not wholly representative of what we now offer We want to push offline and social marketing to help increase or DA In a nutshell, our current name implies 'cheap' and we're moving more upmarket.
Our DA is only 10, and a re-brand will make our brand more marketable.
A stronger brand and DA will help us climb up the rankings quickly - last year we ranked no 1 for a relatively competitive term before dropping a few places. In terms of current traffic: 30% is via SEO (we have a low DA but rank ok for certain phrases) 70% is via adwords We had our website redesigned last year and it performs well.
The idea is to have a new brand logo and colours and move to a new domain.
We will keep all our existing products and content. Please could anyone let me know the implications of this move?
What are potential pitfalls, and what will we need to do to alert Google?
I have read about 301 redirects, would these be required? As always, any help is very much appreciated. Many thanks Abs0 -
Retaining SEO value when changing the shopping cart software
I am looking into purchasing an existing ecommerce site with high SEO rankings. However, the site is old and beyond outdated. The shopping cart would need to be updated (say, to Magento). However, an updated shopping cart will force a change in the URLs (from example.com/category.asp to example.com/category). Will the SEO value be lost? Does anyone have any experience with this issue? There is a significant amount of money for me at stake so I would really appreciate to hear your experiences in this matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ywsw0 -
Ajax website and SEO
Hi all, A client of mine has a website similar to Pintrest. All in Ajax/. So imagine an ajax-grid based animal lover site called domain.com. The domain has three different Categories Cats, Dogs, Mice. When you click on a category, the site doesn't handle the URL and doesn't change the domain So instead of the domain going from domain.com to domain.com/cats, it uses the Ajax script and just shows all the cat pins. and when you click on each pin/post it opens a page such as domain.com/Pin/123/PostTitle It doesn't reference the category. However a page domain.com/cats does exist and you can go there directly. Is this an SEO issue for not grouping all pins under a category? How does Google handle Ajax these days, it use to be real bad but if Pintrest is going so well i'm assuming times have changed? Any other things to be wary of for a grid based/ajax site? I am happy to pay for an hour or two for a more in depth audit/tips if you can feed back on the above. Fairly urgent. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Profero1 -
Social Media and SEO
What is best? Increasing DA and PA on a specific social media profile such as twitter or spreading out the DA and PA on a variety of different profiles?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340 -
HTML entities and SEO
I recently came across an article on HTML entities that discussed how their appear in search results. The same article also mentioned that their use might be considered spam. Since I know nothing of them (other than what I read in the one article) are they a good or bad idea to make meta descriptions stand out from the crowd?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | casper4340