URL Structure Change - 301 Redirect - on large website
-
Hi Guys,
I have a website which has approximately 15 million pages indexed. We are planning to change url structure of 99.99% of pages but it would remain on same domain.
eg: older url: xyz.com/nike-shoes; new url: xyx.com/shopping/nike-shoes
A benefit that we would get is adding a related and important keyword in url. We also achieve other technical benefits in identifying the page type before hand and can reduce time taken to serve the pages (as per our tech team).
For older URLs, we are planning to do a 301 redirect. While this seems to be the correct thing to do as per Google, we do see that there is a very large number of cases where people have suffered significantly on doing something like this :
Here are our questions:
- Will all page rank value will be passed to new url? (i.e. will there be a 100% passing of PR/link juice to the new URLs)
- Can it lower my rank for keywords? (currently we have pretty good rankings (1-5) on many keywords)
- If there is an impact on rankings - will it be only on specific keywords or will we see a sitewide impact?
- Assuming that we have taken a hit on traffic, How much time would it take to get the traffic back to normal? and if traffic goes down, by what percentage it may go down and for how much time. (best case, average case and worst case scenarios)
- Is there anything I should keep in mind while doing this?
I understand that there are no clear answers that can be given to these questions but we would like to evaluate a worst case/best case situation.
Just to give context : Even a 10 day downtime in terms of drops in rankings is extremely detrimental for our business.
-
PixelKicks gave a good answer.
In theory you shouldn't see much, if any, change in rankings, but in practice, any time you move pages, there is some risk. I don't know if you can do a slow migration or not, but if you can, I'd suggest you do the following.
Start small:
Move a portion of the pages (maybe a couple hundred thousand for your big site) first, track their traffic and ranking and see if there is any impact. I'd probably watch the pages for 3-4 weeks just to make sure. If you see a drop, you may want to keep watching them longer to see if it comes back on its own. This should give you an indication of what to expect for the other pages.Setup Canonical Tags First
If you are able, setup the new pages (or entire new site) and then add canonical tags to all the old pages, pointing to the new pages. This will actually start the transition process for Google and others and you may see the pages with canonical tags having been switched in Google in just a few days. After you have seen that most or all the pages have been switched in Google, then setup the 301 redirects.You can see Rand talking about this process in the video on this page: http://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday
How Long to Recover:
You may not see any drop in rankings. You may see a little shifting for a few days, but then everything settles back to where it was. If you do see a drop, it's likely that it will recover after a few weeks or months (as PixelKicks indicated). If, on the other hand, you see a drop and it doesn't self-correct after several weeks, then the recovery is a matter of having to rebuild some authority to your site. The time that will take will depend on how much work you put in to doing that and what your competition is like.Good luck. That's a huge site.
Kurt Steinbrueck
OurChurch.Com -
301's will pass "most" of the value, typically 90%, and you shouldn't see any long term impact from this. However you might notice a bit of short-term action from the changes, particuarly as you have around 15 million pages indexed. Whats the website? Will be interesting to take a look.
I don't think anyone can honestly say what the exact impact will be, but large sites do undergo changes such as what you mention, and you rarely hear reports of long-term pain. As long as you make sure that everything is correctly redirected then you probably won't notice much of a difference.
If you pushed for a definitive answer though I'd estimate within 3 months everything should be steady and back to normal again, and from then onwards you can judge whether the additional keywords have had any impact.
Cheers.
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
-
Temporarily redirecting a small website to a specific url of another website
Hi, I would like to redirect a small website that contains info about a specific project temporarily to a specific url about this project on my main website. Reason for this is that the small website doesn't contain accurate info anymore. We will adapt the content in the next few weeks and then remove the redirect again. Should I set up a 301 or a 302? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mat_C1 -
New Site (redesign) Launched Without 301 Redirects to New Pages - Too Late to Add Redirects?
We recently launched a redesign/redevelopment of a site but failed to put 301 redirects in place for the old URL's. It's been about 2 months. Is it too late to even bother worrying about it at this point? The site has seen a notable decrease in site traffic/visits, perhaps due to this issue. I assume that once the search engines get an error on a URL, it will remove it from displaying in search results after a period of time. I'm just not sure if they will try to re-crawl those old URLs at some point and if so, it may be worth it to have those 301 redirects in place. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BrandBuilder0 -
Multiple 301 Redirect Query
Hello all, I have 2 301 redirects on my some of my landing pages and wondering if this will cause me serious issues. I first did 301 directs across the whole website as we redid our url structure a couple of months ago. We also has location specific landing pages on our categories but due to thin/duplicate content , we have got rid of these by doing 301's back to the main category pages. We do have physical branches at these locations but given that we didnt get much traffic for those specific categories at those locations and the fact that we cannot write thousands of pages of unique content content , we did 301's. Is this going to cause me issues. I would have thought that 301's drop out of serps ? so is this is an issue than it would only be a temporary one ?.. Or should I have 404'd the location category pages instead. Any advice greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
301 redirect rule
Hi there, I have a website that has hundreds of links with a "question mark" at the end of URLs. For example: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iQandil
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory?
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/? I'm want to place a wildcard redirect on the .htaccess file but don't know what exactly to add. Ideally I want the URLs above to be: http://www.domain.com/directory/page.html
http://www.domain.com/directory/another-directory/
http://www.domain.com/directory/yet-another-directory/ Any help is most appreciated. Thanks
Issa0 -
Questions about 301 Redirects
I have about 10 - 15 URLs that are redirecting to http://www.domainname.comwww.domainname.com/. (which is an invalid URL)The website is on a Joomla platform. Does anyone know how I can fix this? I can't figure out where the problem is coming from.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnParker27920 -
Can your site be penalized for changing the url structure and if so how long till you get back?
I'm doing well on yahoo and bing and the only reason I can think of for why I'm not showing on Google is because I changed the url structure a couple of months ago. I have solid on and off page done for this site.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | deciph220 -
Probelms w/ 301 Redirects
I am trying to 301 redirect my old site to the new site (under the same domain. Most of the 404 urls are 301 redirects from 404 pages but they are still able to redirect. I need help understanding why I cannot redirect half of my list. <colgroup><col width="636"> <col width="342"> <col width="64"></colgroup>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Melia
| OLD URL | 301 To: | Status |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/groups.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/groups.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/entertainment/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/all_inclusive.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/los-picapiedra/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/outside-us-telephone-listing.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/restaurantes/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/reuniones-eventos/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/grupos.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/spa/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/terms-condition.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/gallery/beach.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/gallery/dining.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/gastronomy.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/gallery/pools.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/lowest-rate.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/services/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/services.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/services/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/terms-condition.php | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html | done |
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/piscinas.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/playa.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/galeria/restaurantes.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/family-facilities-amenities.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/prensa/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/family-facilities-amenities.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/en/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/accommodations/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/habitaciones.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/dining/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/entertainment/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/events/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/flintstones/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/visor.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/beach.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/dining.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/gastronomia.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/gallery/pools.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/melia-caribe-tropical-announces-fall-promotion.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/press/melia-international-brand-overhaul.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/royal/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicio-real.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/sitemap.html | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/index.html |
|
| http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/spanish/spa/ | http://www.meliacaribetropical.com/es/servicios.html |
| gastronomia.html0 -
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?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jon_KS0