Should I change my permalink structure?
-
Hi guys, hope you've had a manageable working week. Just after some advice!
What would you think to changing the permalink structure of an already established entertainment website so that the category and postdate also appears in the URL, i.e "2014-01-01/news/this-is-the-post"? I have done it before without thinking about all the crawl errors it would cause and quickly reverted everything. However, I am now eager to get listed in Google News (don't worry, this isn't the only reason to change the URL) and think it might help things overall.
Thoughts? Worth the effort or a pointless exercise?
-
Donna - good advice. I think that's the way to go. Thanks very much for the help!
-
John,
there is no right answer to your question, no rule of thumb. As I said earlier, it really depends on your originating pages and how much traffic, bookmarks and inbound links they currently have.
Matt Cutts says "there is no limit to the number of [direct] redirects we'll follow".
If it was me and I was worried about slowing down the site, I'd create all the redirects and watch site speed. If the site slowed down, I'd deal with that then. It's easier to drop redirects than it is to try to recover lost links because the redirects weren't there in the first place.
-
Donna - interesting idea.
I'm working with a new client with about 5,000 pages. I don't want to create hundreds of 404's but if I don't have to redirect 5,000 pages that would be good too.
What, in your opinion, would be too many 404's, too many redirects, or a good ratio of redirects to 404's?
Any suggestions would be very appreciated - thanks!
-
Hutch42 - I have a new client with a similar problem. They have about 5,000 pages with the default WordPress link structure and they want to improve the SEO rankings
That would mean 5,000 redirects - is there such a thing as too many?
I've done this with site of up to 500 but not in the thousands.
Thoughts?
-
No, I don't think letting nature take its course is the answer, but there might be another approach.
You could, as Hutch42 suggests, inventory existing URLs and then gather some additional information, meaning inbound (landing page) traffic and links.
- If a page has inbound traffic it usually means the page is ranking well, bookmarked, linked to or shared. No inbound traffic means people come to the page after having already landed elsewhere on the site.
- If a page has incoming links, that's helping build your domain authority.
Group pages according to the ones that are getting a significant amount in inbound traffic or have inbound links. Redirect those. Don't bother with the others.
Google analytics will tell you which pages have landing page traffic. Use a couple of different link tools to assess which ones have valuable inbound links including Google Webmaster Tools. (Every tool is going to give you a different answer. You want as good an inventory as you can muster.)
How much is "enough" inbound traffic and/or links? That'll be a judgment call on your part. So really you'll need to weigh the amount of effort to do this analysis versus the amount of effort to build the redirects and go from there.
That's my two cents.
-
Yes it's worth it if you don't care about your traffic and you happy to see it disappear.
-
You put all the work into those articles, why would you throw away all the search relevance that they have earned? I would never ever move content and not redirect it, no matter how many 301s I would have to add.
-
I think you may be right, but the sheer amount of redirects necessary would mean that it could take me months. I have been posting 4 articles a day for the past year without fail - could it be worth just leaving the crawl errors and hoping that they eventually drop off? This is my quandary.
-
While you will always loose some ranking with large site wide restructures, you can minimize it by having your redirects in place as soon as you make the shift. When I do restructures or site re-launches I create a large CSV that has all of my current URLs and the corresponding URL that it will update to. Double check the list and use it as a checklist to make sure all of your old content properly redirects to the new. On a side note, when doing something like this it is a good time to update your site to secure as you are already redirecting the majority of your pages, so redirected them to the https: version is not much extra work.
As for if you should do this, that will depend on your site goals and if adding the date in the url would benefit your visitors or corresponds with another digital part of your digital strategy.
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
-
Menu Structure for Large Ecommerce
Hi We have a large ecommerce site, the menu at the moment is limited by the amount of categories we can display. As our site is so large, the menu at the moment only has the top categories and their immediate subcategories, however we have level 3's which go deeper, as there is such a large range. At the moment, they;re not in the top menu, but I want to put a case forward to say why we should include them - I am however mindful of a menu not being overcrowded with hundreds of links. Has anyone had a similar experience of this? Or a case study on how adding important categories to the menu helped improve things? Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
URL Change Best Practice
I'm changing the url of some old pages to see if I can't get a little more organic out of them. After changing the url, and maybe title/desc tags as well, I plan to have Google fetch them. How does Google know that the old url is 301'd to the new url and the new url is not just a page of duplicate content? Thanks... Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
Cleaning up backlinks and changing URLs
Currently we are performing very poorly in organic clicks. We are a e-commerce site with over 2000 products. Issues we thought plagued us: Copied Images from competitors Site wide duplicate content duplicate content from competitor site Number of internal links on a page (300+) Bad backlinks (2.3k from 22 domains and ips) being linked to from sites like m.biz URLs URLs are abbreviated, over 50% lack our keywords Lack of meta descriptions, or too long meta descriptions Current State of fixing these issues: 50% images are now our own Site wide duplicate content near 100% completed Internal links have been dealt with Rewrote content for every product 90% of meta descriptions are fixed From all of these changes we have yet to see increase in traffic...10% increase at best in organic clicks. We think we have penalties on certain URLs. My question for the MOZ community is what is the best way to attack the lack of organic clicks. Our main competition is getting 900% more clicks than us. Any more information you need on the topic let me know and will get back to you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TITOJAX0 -
How fast to change keyword rich anchor text
Hello, A client of mine has a site with almost all keyword rich anchor text, The problem is on on a bunch of little blogs and some (mostly sitewide) paid links. We are working to move into 100% white hat SEO, but we're doing it slowly. My question is, how fast can we change the anchor text on all of these links? I'm worried that if I do it too fast that it will be a red flag. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobGW0 -
Should I change .html to / ?
On my ecommerce site, we have .html extensions on all files and categories. I was wondering if it is worth the development cost to make all of them / ? Is there any SEO benefit in doing so? Thanks, B
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20100 -
Will changing Google Places address hurt rankings?
I have a client transferring ownership of their service business (photo booth rental). The current listed address will change, so my main concern is preserving the rankings during the transition. Should I change the Google Local listing to a new physical address, or change it to "serve a surrounding area"? It seems best to set as "serving a surrounding area", but I know Google is really weird about making local listing changes. I've seen and heard about countless listings falling completely off the map after being updated. Any advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Joes_Ideas0 -
Is it possible to lose rank because my site's IP changed?
I manage a site on the 3dCart e-commerce platform. I recently updated the SSL certificate. Today, when I tried to log-in via FTP, I couldn't connect. The reason I couldn't connect was because my IP had changed. Last week the site experienced almost across the board rankings drops on lmost every important keyword. Not gigantic drops, a lot just lost 2-4 postiions, but that's a lot when you were #2 and you drop to #4 or # 6. Initially I thought it was because I was attempting to markup my product pages using structured data following guidelines from schema.org. I am not a coder so it was a real struggle, especially trying to navigate 3dCart's listing templates. I thought the rankings drops were Google slapping me for bad code, but now I wonder....could I really have dropped down because of that IP address change? Does anyone have a take on this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | danatanseo0 -
Is this structure valid for a canonical tag?
Working on a site, and noticed their canonical tags follow the structure: //www.domain.com/article They cited their reason for this as http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3986.txt. Does anyone know if Google will recognize this as a valid canonical? Are there any issues with using this as a the canonical?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0