Will changing category URLs on site hurt SEO?
-
Hi Moz Community,
We're looking to replace some URLs on our Wordpress site and I want to make sure we won't hurt our SEO with the changes. The site is lushpalm.com
When we originally launched our site we created pages (which are linked to in our main menu) to essentially display our categories. We did this as a workaround because we didn’t like the URL to have the word “category” in it.
Now we would like to make some changes and we want to make sure we’re not going to hurt our SEO in any way by accidentally duplicating content or otherwise.
We want to fix our structure and now link to our category pages from our main menu, BUT we want to change the URL of the category page so that it doesn’t have “category” in it, essentially renaming it the name of the page currently linked to in our main menu.
So basically, the category lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips, would be renamed with the URL lushpalm.com/surf-trips and the current page that is at lushpalm.com/surf-trips would be therefore replaced.
My questions are:
- If we did this, would that mean that the previous “lushpalm.com/category/surf-trips” would cease to exist? Or is there some imprint of that out on the web? And if it is then would it re-direct to the new page?
- Would replacing the current page URL with a category hurt our current SEO in any way?
- Would this change cause any duplicate pages somehow?
Thanks so much for your help!
-
@taralp I know this is an old post but I was looking at redoing my site and URL structure myself.
My concern was losing rankings with drastic changes also. But I ran the site through a SEO tool and it looks like since this post that not only did you not HURT your rankings, the rankings skyrocketed since then,
If you are still around, may I ask were there any other changes to the site around that same time? How long did it take to make the change?
For others that may be reading this. Does Google still take URL structure changes so kindly? Will a simple redirect plugin for WordPress do the trick if I make category and url changes myself?
I want to remove "category" from the slug also and I want to merge and delete some categories and add others.
Thanks!
-
Thank you!
-
Hi Tara,
The best way would be to 301 redirect the old urls to the new urls. So if your url is https://sitename/category/product and you want to change it to https://sitename/product then you must 301 redirect https://sitename/category/product ----> https://sitename/product so you do not loose link juice or receive an enormous amount of 404s.
Thanks,
Don Silvernail
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 is the best SEO way to categorize products on an ecommerce site
What is the best way for SEO to set up categories for an ecommerce site selling beauty products. I have currently built my product categories so that if a person looks under the hydration category they find our body lotion, but also if they look under the body section of products they also will find the same body lotion. Is this a problem for SEO? I think it helps the customer find the product.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kuhliff0 -
SEO impact: Link categories on the description of the products
Hi, Is there any positive or negative SEO impact if I link product categories on the description of the products? Ex: At the product page of the Passenger Car Blue, a link to the Passenger Car category of the website on the product description. Or this is more a UX question?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tiedemann_Anselm
The product page already has a breadcrumb on top. Thanks!0 -
SEO for Product Pages Deal that will last One Day Only
For an Ecommerce website I am required to create two pages. 1) One that will be displaying the "Deal of the day", which is basically a summary of the product on sale and another 2) product page where the actual product-deal resides. "Deal of the day" page Fixed url e.g. homepage.com/deal-of-the-day Product description summary Go to product-deal & Buy Now Button Content changes everyday Product Deal Page Similar to other products, sometimes will be a group of products, coupons etc. Product deals will be stored for later re-use Not visible from the main product catalogue These products are most of the time the same products from the catalogue but different copy Recommendations? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raulreyes0 -
Ranking Sub Categories on Ecommerce Site
Hi, I haven't tested this yet, so before I do I wanted to see if anyone had some experience with this. I have lower level categories I want to rank for SEO for example: Say I want to rank 'Standard Metal Lockers' - with the way our site is set up, I have to work within a classification, which isn't always easy. So it would be categorised as follows: Cupboards & Lockers > Lockers > Standard Lockers > Standard Metal Lockers The URL structure would remain /standard-metal-lockers & I would link this from the 'Lockers' page. Is this too deep in the site structure to rank? I think if it's linked properly & promoted it will be fine, but I'd like to see if anyone else has had this issue. Becky
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Having 2 brands with the same content - will this work from an SEO perspective
Hi All, I would love if someone could help and provide some insights on this. We're a financial institution and have a set of products that we offer. We have recently joined with another brand and will now be offering all our products to their customers. What we are looking to do is have 1 site that masks the content for both sites so it appears as there are 2 seperate brands with different content - in fact we have a main site and then a sister brand that offers the same products. Is there anyway to do this so when someone searches for Credit Card from Brand A it is indexed under Brand A and same when someone searched for Credit Card from Brand B it is indexed under Brand B. The one thing is we would not want to rel:can the pages nor be penalised by googles latest PR algorithm. Hope someone can help! Thanks Dave
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CFCU1 -
When is Too Many Categories Too Many on a eCommerce site?
We all know that more and more people are increasing the amount of different categories that eCommerce sites have. Say for example, you have over 3,000 different products, all categories contain unique text at the top of each, all of the categories link to each other (so loads on internal linking) and no two categories contain the exact same products. My question is this, is there ever a stage that you could create too many categories? Alternatively, do you think you should just keep creating categories based on what our customers search for?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-gate-films1 -
Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not linked to anywhere on your site?
Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jnew9290 -
Multi-Location SEO: Sites vs Pages
I just started with a new company that requires multi-location SEO for its niche product/service. Currently, we have a main corporate website, as well as, 40+ individual dealer websites (we host all). Keep in mind each of these dealers consist of only 1-2 people, so corporate I will be managing the site or sites and content strategy. Many of the individual dealer sites actually rank very well (#1-#3) in their areas for our targeted keywords, but they all use the same duplicate content. Also, there are many dealer sites that have dropped off the radar in last year, which is probably because of the duplicate and static content. So I'm at a crossroads... Attempt to redo all of these location sites with unique and local content for each or Create optimized unique pages for each of them on our main site and redirect their current local domains to their page on our site Any advise regarding which direction to go in and why. Why is very important. It will be very difficult to convince a dealer that is #1 with his local site that we are redirecting to our main site, so I need some good ammo and reasoning. Also, any tips toward achieving local seo success will be greatly appreciated, too! Thank you!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | the-coopersmith0