When the site's entire URL structure changed, should we update the inbound links built pointing to the old URLs?
-
We're changing our website's URL structures, this means all our site URLs will be changed. After this is done, do we need to update the old inbound external links to point to the new URLs? Yes the old URLs will be 301 redirected to the new URLs too. Many thanks!
-
In a perfect world if we could control all the links that link to our site we would have them link to the new URLs. However what I was trying to illustrate is that when you change your URL there is a method of making sure that the old directly which are going to be pointing to your older URL structure Wilburn point to your new URL structure via 301 redirect.
Considering you are changing the URLs with links e.g example.com/old must 301 redirect to example.com/new
-
Thank you very much, Tom!
What I also want to know is, the many external links which linking to the site's older URLs, after the URL changes (and 301 direct), is it necessary to change the links built on the other sites to point to the new URLs instead of the old URLs? If not, what's the disadvantages? This is also a problem many experience after switching to https.
-
They are exactly right as long as the page is the same page. You will get a proper 301 without loss of link juice.
However, if you create new URLs that are not relevant to the old URLs and 301 redirects them, they will become a soft 404 error something that is dangerous.
I would index my site using https://deepcrawl.com or https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
Take the URLs that I am going to change along with the back links and download them to a CSV file.
After that, I would take the site with the new URL structure And compare it my old URL structure
You can also upload your backlinks and make sure that they are going to the same URL ID you can compare the two using deep crawl or upload using screaming frog
This would allow you to synchronize your changes.
See
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/what-you-need-to-prepare-for-a-website-relaunch/
https://www.deepcrawl.com/migrating-a-website-with-deepcrawl/
TEST YOUR NEW XML SITEMAP
Testing a new XML Sitemap before you put it live means you can see whether any important URLs are missing from the new version, and also whether your new version is looking as expected.
(DeepCrawl: Put your legacy URLs in the sitemap and only start highlighting URLs from your new site once they have been indexed. This may take up to three months).
CRAWL THE NEW SITE WITH MODIFIED URLS
You can replace any absolute links to your live site with URLs from your staging site using the URL Rewrite function. This is useful if you are adding a specific section to your site and want to test how it will perform within the wider context of your site architecture.
https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/guide-to-url-design/
I hope this helps
Tom
-
Thank you very much!
-
Hi Jade.
Best case scenario you should if you can update the URL of the links.
Considering that there will be 301 redirects, the loss will not be that much. There's a blog post of Cyrus Shepard talking about the impact of redirects and states that the PR loss is about 15%.
https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo
Best luck.
GR
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
-
If I put a piece of content on an external site can I syndicate to my site later using a rel=canonical link?
Could someone help me with a 'what if ' scenario please? What happens if I publish a piece of content on an external website, but then later decide to also put this content on my website. I want my website to rank first for this content, even though the original location for the content was the external website. Would it be okay for me to put a rel=canonical tag on the external website's content pointing to the copy on my website? Or would this be seen as manipulative?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RG_SEO1 -
Links to my site still showing in Webmaster Tools from a non-existent site
We owned 2 sites, with the pages on Site A all linking over to similar pages on Site B. We wanted to remove the links from Site A to Site B, so we redirected all the links on Site A to the homepage on Site A, and took Site A down completely. Unfortunately we are still seeing the links from Site A coming through on Google Webmaster Tools for Site B. Does anybody know what else we can do to remove these links?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pedstores0 -
We sold our site's domain and have a new one. Where do we go from here?
We recently sold our established domain -- for a compelling price -- and now have the task of transitioning to our new domain. What steps would you recommend to lesson the anticipated decline from search engines in this scenario?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accessintel0 -
My Site is built for a U.S. audience, but my xml:lang in view source is en-gb?
Hi Ya'll, I have a U.S. based site with english content, but my xml lang in my view source ode is in en-gb. Should i change it to "en-US"? Or should i just change it to just "en", that way i can target all english speaking countries..... And if i do make the switch, does it make a difference in my traffic and SEO for the U.S.? Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Site Structure: How do I deal with a great user experience that's not the best for Google's spiders?
We have ~3,000 photos that have all been tagged. We have a wonderful AJAXy interface for users where they can toggle all of these tags to find the exact set of photos they're looking for very quickly. We've also optimized a site structure for Google's benefit that gives each category a page. Each category page links to applicable album pages. Each album page links to individual photo pages. All pages have a good chunk of unique text. Now, for Google, the domain.com/photos index page should be a directory of sorts that links to each category page. Alternatively, the user would probably prefer the AJAXy interface. What is the best way to execute this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tatermarketing0 -
Google News URL Structure
Hi there folks I am looking for some guidance on Google News URLs. We are restructuring the site. A main traffic driver will be the traffic we get from Google News. Most large publishers use: www.site.com/news/12345/this-is-the-title/ Others use www.example.com/news/celebrity/12345/this-is-the-title/ etc. www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ www.example.com/celebrity-news/12345/this-is-the-title/ (Celebrity is a channel on Google News so should we try and follow that format?) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title/12345/ www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/this-is-the-title-12345/ (unique ID no at the end and part of the title URL) www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ Others include the date. So as you can see there are so many combinations and there doesnt seem to be any unity across news sites for this format. Have you any advice on how to structure these URLs? Particularly if we want to been seen as an authority on the following topics: fashion, hair, beauty, and celebrity news - in particular "celebrity name" So should the celebrity news section be www.example.com/news/celebrity-news/celebrity-name/this-is-the-title-12345/ or what? This is for a completely new site build. Thanks Barry
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Deepti_C0 -
Should I link my similar sites together?
Hi I currently have two sites within exactly the same market. I've just purchased a third website from someone. Should I link these sites together? (i.e. in the page header should I cross link them or point two of them to the third?) If I do this will it harm them if they are on the same C-Class IP blocks? Is using private domains and different hosting companies considered dodgey in any way? Basically I'm a big wimp and don't want to do anything potentially that might potentially hurt my rankings;)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blendfish0 -
How to remove bad link to your site?
Hello, Our website www.footballshirtblog.co.uk recently suffered a major Google penalty, wiping out 6 months of hard work. We went from getting 6000-10000 hits a day to absolutely nothing from Google. We have been baffled by the penalty as we couldn't think of anything we've done wrong. After some analysis of Open Site Explorer, it seems I may have found the answer. There is a ton of bad links pointing to us. A few example domains are: ru.gg/ gogopzh.com/ 0575bbs.com/ This is nothing to do with us and so I can only assume some competitor has done this. As we were only about 4-5 months old, I guess Google has punished us. What do we do now? This is not a situation I have experienced before and would really appreciate your expert advice.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ukss19840