How do I best handle a minor URL change?
-
My company is about to complete an upgrade to our website but part of this will be changing the URLs slightly. Mainly the .aspx suffix will be dropped off the pages that we're most worried about. The current URLs will automatically redirect to the new pages, will this be enough or will there be an SEO impact? If it helps the site is www.duracard.com and the product pages are the ones we want to keep ranked. For instance if someone searches for "plastic gift cards" our page '<cite>https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards.aspx</cite>' is #3 and we want to make sure it stays that way once we change it to 'https://www.duracard.com/products/plastic-gift-cards'. Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you!
-
Thanks Adam, that's pretty much what I thought. The owner of the company is pretty paranoid and I'm a bit of a novice at this so I wanted to double check since this isn't a full domain change. I know the pages will be redirected but I'm waiting to hear back from the coder that they'll be 301s.
-
When ever we talk site structure I love to refer to Rand's Intro SEO slideshare (http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/introduction-to-seo-5003433) slides 46 & 47 in this case if I remember correctly.
The basic mantra to remember is that when it comes to URL's - keep it simple.
Google loves simple, clean and meaningful URLs and dropping the .aspx extension should actually serve as a plus long term. While Google may initially rank the old page depending on its indexing and crawls just make sure that the .aspx pages are re-directing with 301 redirects (not 302) and eventually they should swap out entirely.
In all the years I've worked in SEO I've only ever seen sites improve their ranking by cleaning their URL's like this. Just make sure to 301 and you're all set!
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
-
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 -
Are these URL hashtags an SEO issue?
Hi guys - I'm looking at a website which uses hashtags to reveal the relevant content So there's page intro text which stays the same... then you can click a button and the text below that changes So this is www.blablabla.com/packages is the main page - and www.blablabla.com/packages#firstpackage reveals first package text on this page - www.blablabla.com/packages#secondpackage reveals second package text on this same page - and so on. What's the best way to deal with this? My understanding is the URLs after # will not be indexed very easily/atall by Google - what is best practice in this situation?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
How to deal with URLs and tabbed content
Hi All, We're currently redesigning a website for a new home developer and we're trying to figure out the best way to deal with tabbed content in the URL structure. The design of the site at the moment will have a page for a development and within that you can select your house type, then when on the house type page there will be tabs displayed for the user to see things like the plot map, availability and pricing, specifications, etc. The way our development team are looking at handling this is for the URL to use a hashtag or a query string at the end of it so we can still land users on these specific tabs for PPC for example. My question is really, has anyone had any experience with this? Any recommendations on how to best display the urls for SEO? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Canonical Issue with urls
I saw some urls of my site showing duplicate page content, duplicate page title issues on crawl reports. So I have set canonical url for every urls , that has dupicate content / page title. But still SeoMoz crawl test is showing issue. I am giving here one url with issue. The below given urls shown duplicate content and duplicate page title with some other urls all are given below. Checked URL http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7635 dup page content http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trixmediainc
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 dup page Title http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636&category_id=270&sizes=12x15,12x18&click=sizes
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7636
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622&category_id=270&colors=Black_Tones&click=colors&ci=1
http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 But I have set canonical url for all these urls already , that is :- http://www.cyrusrugs.com/bridge-traditional-area-rug-item-7622 This should actually solve the problem right ? Search engine should identify the canonical url as original url and only should consider that. Thanks0 -
Changing URLs to include a fixed identifier or ID
The Scenario: I got pages that I need to track, located in a domain, within several folders. Adding a common identifier or ID (eg. www.domain.com/folder/page-name-identifier.html) in those URL's will ease my work so I would be able to select, in Anlx, all traffic including URL's with that specific identifier. URL's for which track is needed lack this identifier today. My Plan: add identifier (7 letters fixed and common for all URLs) to those existing pages and 301 redirect from old to new URL's My Question: will this change of URL's and redirections SEO-hurt me in anyway?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tit0 -
Can we really learn from the best?
Hi All, When I started my site (an eCommerce site) I copied (or tried) a lot of things from the best eCommerce sites I thought were out there. Sites like Zappos, ZALES, Overstock, BlueNile etc. I got hit pretty hard with latest algo changes and I posted my question at Google Webmaster Help forum I received answers from Gurus that we are keyword stuffing etc. (mainly with internal links to product pages but other issues as well). My answer was a link to Zappos and other sites showing that what we do is nothing compared to them. I also showed dozens of SEO "errors" like using H1 tag 10 times per page, not using canonicals and many other issues. The Guru's answer was "LOL" - who am I to compare myself to Zappos. So the question is... Can we take them for example or are they first simply because they are the biggest?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet0 -
Pretty URLs... do they matter?
Given the following urls: example.com/warriors/ninjas/ example.com/warriors/ninjas/cid=WRS-NIN01 Is there any difference from an SEO perspective? Aesthetically the 2nd bugs me but that's not a statistical difference. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nymbot0 -
Should I change Permalinks?
I have a site that is doing well in rankings, and its also been accepted in to Google news. I have around 800 article live on the site. My current permalink structure is - /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/ What I am wondering, would it be better to change it to - /%postname%/ The reason I ask is that most of the well ranking sites and sites built by SEO companies all seem to have the /%postname%/ Will I get a benefit from changing this? I know that I could republish content have the /%postname%/ permalinks. Are there any other benefits? If the is a benefit, I'd perefr to change it as soon as possible before the site grows even more Thanks in advance for anyone who can help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters0