Quick URL structure question
-
Say you've got 5,000 articles. Each of these are from 2-3 generations of taxonomy. For example:
- example.com/motherboard/pc/asus39450
- example.com/soundcard/pc/hp39
- example.com/ethernet/software/freeware/stuffit294
None of the articles were SUPER popular as is, but they still bring in a bit of residual traffic combined. Few thousand or so a day. You're switching to a brand new platform. Awesome new structure, taxonomy, etc. The real deal. But, historically, you don't have the old taxonomy functions. The articles above, if created today, file under
This is the way it is from here on out. But what to do with the historical files?
- keep the original URL structure, in the new system. Readers might be confused if they try to reach example.com/motherboard, but at least you retain all SEO weight and these articles are all older anyways. Who cares? Grab some lunch.
- change the urls to /hardware/, and redirect everything the right way. Lose some rank maybe, but its a smooth operation, nice and neat. Grab some dinner.
- change the urls to /hardware/ DONT redirect, surprise Google with 5k articles about old computer hardware. Magical traffic splurge, go skydiving.
- Panic, cry into your pillow. Get job signing receipts at CostCo
Thoughts?
-
I would stick with the old URL structure. If you redirect there could be some loss of anchor text on inbound links and perhaps in linkjuice. If you are making nice money and these pages have external links don't walk the tightrope just to get tidy file names.
-
Option 2. You'll want to use a 301 redirect to send all traffic going to the old URLs straight to the new URL. Your users may be a little disoriented seeing the new URL but they'll at least arrive to the information they're looking for. The robots will see your new URL and assign the link juice there. Win for robots and humans.
Unless you don't care that much, in which case option 1 is clearly the easiest.
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 to do with parameter urls?
We have a ton of ugly parameter urls that are coming up in google, in semrush, etc. What do we do with them? I know they can cause issues. EX https://www.hibbshomes.com/wp-content/themes/highstand/assets/js/cubeportfolio/js/jquery.cubeportfolio.min.js?ver=6.3
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | stldanni0 -
HTTP to HTTPS Question
Hello, I have a question regarding SSL Certificates I think I know the answer to but wanted to make sure. One of our clients’ site uses http for their pages but when they started creating Registration forms they created a full duplicate site on https (so now there are two versions of all of the pages). I know due to duplicate concerns this could be an issue and needs to resolved (as well as the pros and cons of both) but if they are already set up with https does it make sense to just move everything there or in some instances would it pay to keep some pages http (using canonical tags, redirects, htccess…etc)? – Most of the information I found related to making the decision prior to having both or describing the process but I couldn’t find anything that specifically related to if both are already present. I thought that the best approach because everything’s already set up is to just move everything over to the more secure one but was curious if anybody had any insight? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ben-R0 -
Can you nofollow a URL?
Hey Moz Community, My questions sounds pretty simple but unfortunately, it isn't. I have a domain name (we'll use example.com for this) http://example.com which 301 re-directs to http://www.example.com. http://example.com has bad links pointing to it and http://www.example.com does not. So essentially, I want to stop negative influences from http://example.com being passed on to http://www.example.com. A 302 re-direct sounds like it would work in theory but is this the best way to go about this? Just so you know, we have completed a reconsideration request a long time ago but I think the bad links are still negatively affecting the website as it does not rank for it's own name which is bizarre. Actual Question: How do I re-direct http://example.com to http://www.example.com without passing on the negative SEO attached to http://example.com? Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RiceMedia0 -
Complex URL Migration
Hi There, I have three separate questions which are all related. Some brief back ground. My client has an adventure tourism company that takes predominantly North American customers on adventure tours to three separate destinations: New Zealand, South America and the Himalayas. They previously had these sites on their own URL's. These URL's had the destination in the URL (eg: sitenewzealand.com). 2 of the three URL's had good age and lots of incoming links. This time last year a new web company was bought in and convinced them to pull all three sites onto a single domain and to put the sites under sub folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand). The built a brand new site for them on a Joomla platform. Unfortunately the new sites have not performed and halved the previous call to action rates. Organic traffic was not adversely affected with this change, however it hasn't grown either. I have been overhauling these new sites with a project team and we have managed to keep the new design but make usability/marketing changes that have the conversion rate nearly back to where it originally was and we have managed to keep the new design (and the CMS) in place. We have recently made programmatic changes to the joomla system to push the separate destination sites back onto their original URL's. My first question is around whether technically this was a good idea. Question 1 Does our logic below add up or is it flawed logic? The reasons we decided to migrate the sites back onto their old URL's were: We have assumed that with the majority of searches containing the actual destination (eg: "New Zealand") that all other things being equal it is likely to attract a higher click through rate on the domain www.sitenewzealand.com than for www.site.com/new-zealand. Having the "newzealand" in the actual URL would provide a rankings boost for target keyword phrases containing "new zealand" in them. We also wanted to create the consumer perception that we are specialists in each of the destinations which we service rather than having a single site which positions us as a "multi-destination" global travel company. Two of the old sites had solid incoming links and there has been very little new links acquired for the domain used for the past 12 months. It was also assumed that with the sites on their own domains that the theme for each site would be completely destination specific rather than having the single site with multiple destinations on it diluting this destination theme relevance. It is assumed that this would also help us to rank better for the destination specific search phrases (which account for 95% of all target keyword phrases). The downsides of this approach were that we were splitting out content onto three sites instead of one with a presumed associated drop in authority overall. The other major one was the actual disruption that a relatively complex domain migration could cause. Opinions on the logic we adopted for deciding to split these domains out would be highly appreciated. Question 2 We migrated the folder based destination specific sites back onto their old domains at the start of March. We were careful to thoroughly prepare the htaccess file to ensure we covered off all the new redirects needed and to directly redirect the old redirects to the new pages. The structure of each site and the content remained the same across the destination specific folders (eg: site.com/new-zealand/hiking became sitenewzealand.com/hiking). To achieve this splitting out of sites and the ability to keep the single instance of Joomla we wrote custom code to dynamically rewrite the URL's. This worked as designed. Unfortunately however, Joomla had a component which was dynamically creating the google site maps and as this had not had any code changes it got all confused and started feeding up a heap of URL's which never previously existed. This resulted in each site having 1000 - 2000 404's. It took us three weeks to work this out and to put a fix into place. This has now been done and we are down to zero 404's for each site in GWT and we have proper google site maps submitted (all done 3 days ago). In the meantime our organic rankings and traffic began to decline after around 5 days (after the migration) and after 10 days had dropped down to around 300 daily visitors from around 700 daily visitors. It has remained at that level for the past 2 weeks with no sign of any recovery. Now that we have fixed the 404's and have accurate site maps into google, how long do you think it will take to start to see an upwards trend again and how long it is likely to take to get to similar levels of organic traffic compared to pre-migration levels? (if at all). Question 3 The owner of the company is understandably nervous about the overall situation. He is wishing right now that we had never made the migration. If we decided to roll back to what we previously had are we likely to cause further recovery delays and would it come back to what we previously had in a reasonably quick time frame? A huge thanks to everyone for reading what is quite a technical and lengthy post and a big thank you in advance for any answers. Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activenz
Conrad0 -
"Category" word in URLs of blog is it SEO Friendly URL ??
Hello respected community members, I saw many times that "Category" word comes in URL of blog. So my que is that is this negative for SEO or Positive. & if we don't wanna to come CATEGORY in URL how can we remove while URL Optimization ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sourabhrana390 -
Site structure from an SEO standpoint
I am fortunate enough to be working with a client who is still building their website. From a site structure standpoint, what can I look for with my SEO hat as they build their wire frames and storyboard their site? I want to make sure I don't miss any components that might be helpful short and long term
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StreetwiseReports0 -
How important is it to canonicalize mobile URLs to desktop URLs?
I know many SEO's prefer a stylesheet and single URL, but if you use m.domain.com, do you canonicalize to your desktop URLS?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
URL Structure - Keywords vs. Information Architecture/Navigation
I'm creating the URL structure for an ecommerce site and was wondering if it's better to structure my URLs according to the most popular way people word their key phrases or by what makes most sense from a navigation perspective. Let's say I'm selling clothing (I'm not, just an example). I want the site to be open enough so a user can navigate by Person Type (Men's, Women's, Children's), Clothing Type (Shoes, Shirts, Hats), and Brands (Nike, Reebok, adidas). My gut and past experience say to structure the URLs from the least specific to the most specific: mysite.com/mens/shoes/nike But I know "men's Nike shoes" is searched for more than "men's shoes Nike", which would render this URL: mysite.com/mens/nike/shoes I know mysite.com/mens-nike-shoes would be best, but the folders setup is what I have to work with. So which is best for SEO? URLs that play to the structure of the most searched for key phrases? Or URLs that follow the information architecture/navigation of a site? Nate
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rball10