Friendly URLS (SEO urls)
-
Hello,
I own a eCommerce site with more than 5k of products, urls of products are :
www.site.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=61_87&product_id=266
Im thinking about make it friend to seo site.com/category/product-brand
Here is my question,will I lost ranks for make that change? Its very important to me know it
Thank you very much!
-
"Yes, with any URL change you will lose rank. There is a golden rule : never change URLS."
I respectfully disagree. The golden rule is keep your domain name unless the site is completely nuked. Update URLs to be more SEO friendly, especially if they look like the ones you have.
301 redirect appropriately, and if the new pages have the same content they will simply assume the ranking positions of the old URLs. Test a category first if you're nervous.
-
My experience is that any drop in rankings are extremely brief, especially if you carefully redirect all pages (as the others recommended). There have been occasions that I've seen quite the opposite happen... within 2 days, rankings shot to the top for the bulk of the phrases I was monitoring. Of course, that can be dependent upon your niche.
I have found that the long-term positive of cleaner URLs far outweighs the short-term negative. If you are careful and thorough with your 301 redirects, there might be no negative, IMHO.
-
Hello,
Yes, with any URL change you will lose rank. There is a golden rule : never change URLS.
I do understand the reason for this change and over medium - long term it might be a very good decision but on a short run you might see some Serps dance.
Now of course you need to 301 redirect each old page to the new page on a 1:1 basis. But even so you will lose some as 301 redirects don't pass all the PR from one page to another.
I had similar cases when some site went from some urls with dot asp to LAMP and they had to change any way .. with 301 redirects and new friendly URLS on short term they lost some rankings but on a long term they gain in rankings. so if you do that fro a client make them cristal clear that they will see some drops in the beginning.
If you can with this change improve other elements that will help blur the drops.
Also a very good idea is to change on stages - base don categories or something - if that is possibile as in this way you can track, monitor and adjust as you move forward and also you won't drop site wide with a full site url change. (but sometimes that's not possibile).
Hope it helps.
Cheers.
-
It's always good to have seo friendly urls, both for the bots and the users so they can easily understand what the page is about even in serps!
So you have to be cautious:
- be sure to implement well your 301s. Don't leave any page out if so you may lose real rankings
- prepare a new sitemap to submit as soon as you'll be swapping urls.
Even with that google will take a little to fully digest your new urls. SO you'll see some lower rankings at the beginning but maybe you'll recover in a couple of weeks.
Why not make a test with a bunch of lower priorities pages? So you'll be sure about the time to recover and maybe the impact will be less since it will be spreaded in a longer period.
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
-
What will be the future of seo ?
this question may sound like old one but i want to know something in depth. i mean will seo live forever ? Will i loose my seo job ? so just wanted to know what will be the future of seo ?
Technical SEO | | isolve1 -
MaxMind GeoIP SEO Impact
Hi, A client has mentioned that they are working with their design company to create three different hompage versions (one for Scotland, one for England and one for international visitors) which will be shown to the visitors dependent upon their locations. They are working in connection with MaxMind who I have not come across before. My question is would this have a negative impact on SEO?
Technical SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
SEO url best practices
We're revamping our site architecture and making several services pages that are accessible from one overarching service page. An example would be as follows: Services Student Services Essay editing Essay revision Author Services Book editing Manuscript critique We'll also be putting breadcrumbs throughout the site for easy navigation, however, is it imperative that we build the URLs that deep? For example, could we simply have www.site.com/essay-editing rather than www.site.com/services/students/essay-editing? I prefer the simplicity of the former, but I feel the latter may be more "search robot friendly" and better for SEO. Any advice on this is much appreciated.
Technical SEO | | Kibin0 -
I have altered a url as it was too long. Do I need to do a 301 redirect for the old url?
Crawl diagnostics has shown a url that is too long on one of our sites. I have altered it to make it shorter. Do I now need to do a 301 redirect from the old url? I have altered a url previously and the old url now goes to the home page - can't understand why. Anyone know what is best practice here? Thanks
Technical SEO | | kingwheelie0 -
Client with Very Very Bad Onsite SEO
So one of my clients has a really really bad website from the technical perspective. I am talking over 75k in violations and warnings. Granted, the tagging is done well but any other SEO violation you can think of is occurring. In any case, they are building a new website, and I am on a retainer for a couple hours a week to do some link building. I am feeling like I am not getting anywhere. What is your advice? Should I keep on keeping on or advice the client to put SEO on hold until the technical issues are resolved. I feel like all of this link building isn't having the value that it could have with a site like this.
Technical SEO | | runnerkik0 -
I need help to define which is the best friendly url structure
Hi, I need some help to define which is the best friendly url structure for my new project, I'm in doubt for some cases, anyone could help me define which would be the best way? domain.com/buy-online/0-1,this-cool-model or
Technical SEO | | LeonardoLima
domain.com/buy-online/this-cool-model,0-1 or
domain.com/buy-online/0-1/this-cool-model or
domain.com/buy-online/this-cool-model/0-1 or
domain.com/buy-online/this-cool-model_0-1 or
domain.com/buy-online/this-cool-model?Model=0&OtherParam=1 Thanks! Best Regards,
Leonardo Lima0 -
Use of + in url good or bad?
Hi, I am working on a SEO project for a client.
Technical SEO | | MaartenvandenBos
Some of the urls have a + between the keyword.
like www.example.com/make+me+happy/ Is this good or bad for seo?
Or is it maybe better to use - ? Thanks!0 -
When to SEO optimize a blog post?
Hi there, Here's our situation: there are two people working on the blog. person 1) writes the posts person 2) SEO optimizes the posts I know this is not ideal but it's the best we can do and it's a whole lot better than no blog. 🙂 I'm the fellow optimizing the posts. I've found that my best SEO efforts usually slightly undermine the readability of these posts -- not in an extreme way, I'm not going overboard with keywords or anything. Rather, things like a sexy & enticing article heading may have to be dummed down for search engines... Because of this dumming down, I like to wait a couple of weeks to SEO optimize our posts, the logic being that we get the best of both worlds: a happy regular readership on topic articles that are clearly described for (and aligned to the terms used by) our search engine visitors What I'm wondering is, Generally: can you see any problems with this setup? would you do it differently? Specifically: does Google (et al) punish this sort of backwards re-writing? and, does it somehow amount to less SEO mojo when done retroactively? Thanks so much for your time! Best, Jon
Technical SEO | | JonAmar0