Advice on strange URL problem
-
I'm considering doing some pro bono work for a local non-profit and upon initial review they have a number of serious issues but there is one in particular I'd like to check my thinking on.
The developer who set up the site some years ago implemented a javascript redirect on their root domain so that it redirects to:
This is wrong for all kinds of reasons and I want to recommend eliminating this redirect and getting rid of the 'wordpress' part of the path altogether. However, the site is quite established with good PR and they would take a hit by changing the path.
I'd do 301 redirects to the new URLs that would not have 'wordpress' in the path in addition to other remediation.
My question - is my thinking here good? It's worth it, right? The other option is just get rid of the weird redirect and keep 'wordpress' in the path but this seems unacceptable to me.
Any opinions?
-
Thanks, Andrew! I had done this for handfuls of pages at a time, but not an entire site and it had me concerned. I appreciate the advice!
-
Hi John,
Agree - sounds very messy!
With regard to any 'ranking drop' I really wouldn't worry about this either. I had the same concerns a few weeks ago when I redirected my entire website (an old keyword loaded domain to acornseo.com).
I did a quick audit of the site using Screaming Frog to get all the links, then 301'd each one individually to the new location. The process was very easy, the time it takes depends on the number of pages your website has.
Looking at the Google results after I made the change, I could see my new links appearing in the results, just below the old ones. After a few days the old ones had disappeared and the new acornseo.com links replaced them completely - in effect I had zero ranking downtime, and haven't seen any loss of position since the change over.
Hope that helps.
Cheers,
Andrew
-
OK, thanks for your advice.
-
I'm saying keep your URLs. You can move them but there's a short-term penalty for doing so. Proper 301s will keep it from being too bad but, as my mother likes to say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it!
-
Thanks Highland. Are you saying you think keeping the 'wordpress' in the path is the way to go or would you get rid of it? Not sure what you mean when you say 'original URLs'.
-
Thanks, Andrew. Actually the entire site is in the wordpress folder and they don't use the blogging functionality. So if you visit the site with javascript disabled you get a blank page. The home page is actually http://domain.com/wordpress but the root domain (without the 'wordpress' attached) returns a 200 response code. It essentially just contains a javascript redirect. What a mess.
So, I was going to do exactly as you suggest but wanted to make sure it would be worth the hit in the search results and I wasn't just responding emotionally to the poor technical and aesthetic aspects of the set up.
-
I agree that keeping the original URLs is the better way to go (you'll lose some SEO momentum changing them). I also agree that a 301 from the root to the wordpress directory would be superior to a JS redirect. Googlebot is probably smart enough to figure that one out (especially if the site is indexed) but there's no reason not to do this and make sure.
-
Hi John,
Using the 'wordpress' name isn't ideal, and I would agree you could make it more user-friendly. Depending on what is actually in the subfolder, a standard 301 redirect from 'wordpress' to 'blog' should do the trick.
However, you could also consider moving the 'wordpress' folder to the root domain and getting rid of the javascript redirect. Then you have the website on the root. Moving Wordpress instances from one directory to another is relatively painless - get back to me if you need advice on that front.
Hope that helps,
Cheers
Andrew
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 has caps, but canonical does not. Now what?
Hi, Just started working with a site that has the occasional url with a capital, but then the url in the canonical as lower case. Neither, when entered in a browser, resolves to the other. It's a Shopify site. What do you think I should do?
Technical SEO | | 945010 -
Language Specific Characters in URLs for
Hi People, would really appreciate your advice as we are debating best practice and advice seems very subjective depending if we are talking to our dev or SEO team. We are developing a website aimed at the South American market with content entirely in Spanish. This is our first international site so our experience is limited. Should we be using Spanish characters (such as www.xyz.com/contáctanos) in URLs or should we use ASCII character replacements? What are the pros and cons for SEO and usability? Would really be great to get advice from the Moz community and make me look good at the same time as it was my suggestion 🙂 Nick
Technical SEO | | nickspiteri0 -
Is anyone having problems with sending emails
I have been having problems for a number of weeks now, where if i send a couple of emails out then all of a sudden i am blocked and have to ask my hosting company for a new ip address. my site is in joomla and my email address is through my site. the messages i am getting when sending emails is as follows, and this stays like this until i get a new ip address A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-184886
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed: 550-5.7.1 [184.154.89.211 1] Our system has detected an unusual rate of
550-5.7.1 unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our
550-5.7.1 users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been blocked.
550-5.7.1 Please visit http://www.google.com/mail/help/bulk_mail.html to review
550 5.7.1 our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. r2si12781844igh.70 - gsmtp any help would be great0 -
# in url affecting rank
Hi I am building links to a page www.companyname.com/category.index.php There is also another similar url www.companyname.com/category.index.php#. This page is linked to from the non # page. This is a new client and I'm not entirely sure why that link is there. Am I correct in thinking that these two urls are different in the eyes of the search engines? If so, would some of the link juice to www.companyname.com/category.index.php be transferred to www.companyname.com/category.index.php# and affect the ranking of the non # page? I hope this makes sense! Thanks
Technical SEO | | sicseo0 -
Identifying a 301-redirect problem?
I was looking at the Search Engine Optimization reports for one of my clients in Google Analytics, and I saw that their two biggest landing pages are www.website.com and http://website.com. Does this mean that Google is serving both the 'www' and 'non-www' versions of the website, and thus harming the website's overall ranking? Thanks for any input!
Technical SEO | | williammarlow0 -
Problem with Rel Canonical
Background: We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. Clearly I am doing something wrong here, how do I check my various pages to see where the problem lies and how do I go about fixing it?
Technical SEO | | SallySerfas0 -
Trailing Slashes In Url use Canonical Url or 301 Redirect?
I was thinking of using 301 redirects for trailing slahes to no trailing slashes for my urls. EG: www.url.com/page1/ 301 redirect to www.url.com/page1 Already got a redirect for non-www to www already. Just wondering in my case would it be best to continue using htacces for the trailing slash redirect or just go with Canonical URLs?
Technical SEO | | upick-1623910 -
Canonical for non-exist URL ?
Hi I have a website what has parameter URL. For example www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2 I want that search engine see my page URL as; www.example.com/toys/cars But this URL is not exist in my website. And when i externally enter this page it goes to 404 page. If i add canonical url as www.example.com/toys/cars to the page www.example.com/index.php?page_id=1&no=2, what happened ? Is the url at the serp change as www.example.com/toys/cars ?
Technical SEO | | SEMTurkey0