Custom Permalinks (aka alias') - does it look spammy to googlebot?
-
I am moving my whole site over to wordpress (150+pgs). In the process I assigned pages to appropriate parent pages via "page attributes".
I was really excited about this. I like how it organizes everything in the pages dashboard. I also think that the sitemap that comes with my theme can create something really great for visitors with this info.
What I realized after doing that is that it changed my url to include the parent page. Basically, the url is now "domain.com/parent-page/child-page.html". This is rather disasterous because the url's of these newly created child pages on my old site are simple "domain.com/child-page". Not that they're defined as parent or child pages on my existing dreamweaver/html site... but you know what I mean - Right?!
I got a plugin called "Permalink Editor" to let me customize the url. So, I went through all of the child pages and got rid of the parent page in the url.
Then when I woke up this morning I realized that what I've created is a "permalink alias". That sounds a little bit scary to me. Perhaps like google could consider it spam and like I'm trying to "sculpt link flow".
I'm not... I'm just trying to recreate my site as it is in wordpress. I want the site to be exactly the same in terms of the url's. But, I want the many benefit's of wordpress' CMS.
Should I go an unassign all of the parent/child pages in the "Page Attributes". Or, am I being paranoid and should I leave it as is?
fyi - this is the first page that came up with I searched for permalink alias. It looks kind of black-hatty to me?!
- http://www.seodesignsolutions.com/blog/wordpress-seo/seo-ultimate-4-7/Thanks so much. I look forward to a response!
-
Hi There
Here's what I would do;
1. Set up the new WordPress site exactly how you want it to appear. Use the best URL structure that makes sense - don't worry about what it was on the old site. In most cases, the way WordPress does it with parent pages is totally fine.
2. In excel - make a column all the pages on your old web site - you can use Screaming Frog to crawl the site and do this. Then, in the next column, match the old pages with the corresponding new pages from the WordPress site. The URLs are going to be different but that's ok.
3. Last step - when you make the new WordPress site live, you just need to 301 redirect the old URLs from Dreamweaver to the new one for WordPress. A 301 redirect is something that directs users to the new updated page. You can do a 301 redirect with the Redirection plugin for wordpress.
What you end up with, is a new site with new URLs for each page - but the old pages get redirected to the correct new ones.
Hopefully that makes sense? And very sorry this question was not picked up sooner!
-Dan
-
Anyone??
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
-
Spam URL'S in search results
We built a new website for a client. When I do 'site:clientswebsite.com' in Google it shows some of the real, recently submitted pages. But it also shows many pages of spam url results, like this 'clientswebsite.com/gockumamaso/22753.htm' - all of which then go to the sites 404 page. They have page titles and meta descriptions in Chinese or Japanese too. Some of the urls are of real pages, and link to the correct page, despite having the same Chinese page titles and descriptions in the SERPS. When I went to remove all the spammy urls in Search Console (it only allowed me to temporarily hide them), a whole load of new ones popped up in the SERPS after a day or two. The site files itself are all fine, with no errors in the server logs. All the usual stuff...robots.txt, sitemap etc seems ok and the proper pages have all been requested for indexing and are slowly appearing. The spammy ones continue though. What is going on and how can I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Digital-Murph0 -
IT's Hurt My Rank?HELP!!!
hi,guys,john here, i just began use the MOZ service several days ago, recently i noticed one thing that one keyword on the first google search result page, but when i done some external links,the rank down from 1 to 8, i think may be the bad quality external links caused the rank down. so my question,should i delete the bad quality links or build more better quality links? which is better for me. easy to delete the bad links and hard to build high quality links. so what's your better opinion,guys? thanks John
Technical SEO | | smokstore0 -
Can't understand poor rankings
Hi Guys Our site gets an A for on page optimisation and has much more backlinks and content than our competitors yet we rank no where for majority of keywords Please Help! Mike
Technical SEO | | MikeAquaspresso0 -
My blog post for a specific keyword is in the 'omitted results'. Why might this be, and how to overcome it?
My website Homepage: http://kulraj.org Here is the page I am working to rank for:** http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/** When I search specifically for 'kulraj hedonic treadmill' just to test it, the first result is this: kulraj.org_/tag/_hedonic-treadmill. It shows the shortened version of the article that is within the Tag page. [I'm new to SEO and Moz, please keep in mind] Moz has told me I have duplicate content, which is regarding my main Blog page and Tags page, which is true the content is duplicate. However, the actual blog post itself is not displayed anywhere else on the website, or anywhere else on the web. Moz confirms this, and reports no duplicate content warning. My questions, therefore, are: 1. How do I actually go about installing a rel canonical tag within a standard WordPress dashboard (I'm using Genesis Framework) - I'm finding great difficulty finding instructions on this anywhere on the web. I clearly need to fix the issue with Blog page and Tags Page. 2. Why would my blog post be omitted, and are there any suggestions I could implement to bring it into the main search results. Other things I've noticed: 1. If I type this URL in: kulraj.org/hedonic-treadmill, it automatically redirects to http://kulraj.org/2014/07/15/hedonic-treadmill/ 2. Inside Google Webmaster Tools it says: No new messages or recent critical issues. 3. Regarding the above, when I click 'Labs > author stats' within Webmaster Tools, it shows nil stats, so something there is not quite right either, even though Google+ Authorship is confirmed.
Technical SEO | | Kulraj0 -
Data Highlighter doesn't show page
We have an event related website http://www.sbo.nl so i wanted to use data highlighter because most of our event pages are the same. But data highlighter doesn't show those pages, I will see only an empty page. For example http://www.sbo.nl/veiligheid/brandveiligheid-gebouwen/ Does someone of you understand what is going on. Data highlighter does show the homepage. I am thinking it is maybe because of tabbed browsing, or the chat function in that page. Hope someone can help. You can see a screenshot of Data Highlighter http://www.clipular.com/c?6659030=2X2gQv4O8_9RzcZ1Hk_7xGtCPYo&f=d40975c80bdd11dc357f050cafa73a80 I hope someone can help because i am lost 🙂 Cheers Ruud
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Inconsistent page titles in SERP's
I encountered a strange phenomenon lately and I’d like to hear if you have any idea what’s causing it. For the past couple of weeks I’ve seen some our Google rankings getting unstable. While looking for a cause, I found that for some pages, Google results display another page title than the actual meta title of the page. Examples http://www.atexopleiding.nl Meta title: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring - Atexopleiding.nl Title in SERP: Atexopleiding.nl: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring http://www.reedbusinessopleidingen.nl/opleidingen/veiligheid/veiligheidskunde Meta title: Opleiding Veiligheidskunde, MBO & HBO - Reed Business Opleidingen Title in SERP: Veiligheidskunde - Reed Business Opleidingen http://www.pbna.com/vca-examens/ Meta title: Behaal uw VCA diploma bij de grootste van Nederland - PBNA Title in SERP: VCA Examens – PBNA I’ve looked in the source code, fetched some pages as Googlebot in WMT, but the title shown in the SERP doesn’t even exist in the source code. Now I suspect this might have something to do with the “cookiewall” implemented on our sites. Here’s why: Cookiewall was implemented end of January The problem didn’t exist until recently, though I can’t pinpoint an exact date. Problem exists on both rbo.nl, atexopleiding.nl & pbna.com, the latter running on Silverstripe CMS instead of WP. This rules out CMS specific causes. The image preview in the SERPS of many pages show the cookie alert overlay However, I’m not able to technically prove that the cookiescript causes this and I’d like to rule out other any obvious causes before I "blame it on the cookies" :). What do you think?
Technical SEO | | RBO0 -
How much are redirected links that look like this worth?
Hi, All! If another site (example.com) links to you, and upon mouseover of the link, you see it's supposed to go to something like: http://example.com/index.php?option=com_mtree&task=visit&link_id=123&Itemid=456 and then when clicked on you get to your actual site, is that considered a real link? How much of a link? Thanks! Aviva
Technical SEO | | debi_zyx0 -
I think I'm stuck in a 301 redirect loop
Hi all, I'm trying to correct some of my duplicate content errors. The site is built on Miva Merchant and the storefront page, /SFNT.html, needs to be permanently redirected to www.mydomain.com This is what my .htaccess file looks like: #RedirectPermanent /index.html http://dev.mydomain.com/mm5/merchant.mvc? RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dev.mydomain.com$ [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://dev.emydomain.com/$1 [L,R=301] DirectoryIndex index.html index.htm index.php /mm5/merchant.mvc redirect 301 /SFNT.html http://dev.mydomain.com/ RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} Screen=SFNT&Store_Code=MYSTORECODE [NC] When I use this code and navigate to http://dev.mydomain.com/SFNT.html the URL gets rewritten as http://dev.mydomain.com/?Screen=SFNT So I believe this is what's called a "redirect loop".... Can anyone provide any insight? I'm not a developer, but have been tasked with cleaning up the problems on the website and can use any input anyone is willing to offer. Thanks, jr
Technical SEO | | Technical_Contact0