A Client Changed the Link Structure for Their Site... Not Just Once, but Twice
-
I have a client who's experiencing a number of crawl errors, which I've gotten down fo 9,000 from 18,000. One of the challenges they experience is that they've modified their URL structure a couple times.
First it was: site.com/year/month/day/post-name
Then it was: site.com/category/post-name
Now it's: site.com/post-nameI'm not sure of the time elapsed between these changes, but enough time has passed that the URLs for the previous two URL structures have been indexed and spit out 404s now.
What's the best/clean way to address this issue?I'm not going to create 9k redirect rules obviously, but there's got to be a way to address this issue and resolve it moving forward.
-
That looks like a very useful plugin Keri
-
Look for the "Redirection" plugin for Wordpress, that can help you make redirects easily. It's also an easy way to let you see what's a 404 on your site, and make redirects from the page listing the 404s.
-
Sure, here's the mod_rewrite guide straight from the horse's mouth
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.htmlHere's a nice beginner's guide:
http://www.addedbytes.com/for-beginners/url-rewriting-for-beginners/...with a little cheatsheet for some of the common commands:
http://www.cheatography.com/davechild/cheat-sheets/mod-rewrite/ -
Wow guys! Thanks for the responses. You've given me a couple things to think about.
The suggestions from Thomas and GYMSN might be the way I choose to plod ahead. Though, the rewrite rule seems like an interesting play. I have no idea what either of those lines mean. Heh. Is there a reference you could recommend, Woj, that might shed more light on rewrite rules?
A couple technical pieces to throw out there:
1. It's a WordPress site, so they don't have "folders," per se.
2. They run on linux, with an apache web server
-
Ryan is absolutely spot on.. you can create some redirection rules in the .htaccess (assuming the site's on apache)
something along the lines of..
RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([0-9]{2})/(.*)$ /$4 [R=301,NC,L]
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,NC,L]
(of course if totally depends on your site structure & I'd test these on a staging server if possible)
-
Thomas did what we did and it worked fine. We lost a ton of Yahoo rankings for significant keywords though. I now personally never change /url/keywords unless I don't care about the Yahoo traffic (or there is none). Google has no problem with it.
-
You could do this with one or two clever regex commands, the composition of which I can't think of cos its too close to quitting time on Friday. But yeah you don't need 9000 rules.
-
Have you tried creating a redirect rule for each of the folders? From you example above the "post-name" has remained consistent. Therefore if you create a redirect from each folder then you should see a proper resolution with just appending the "post-name"
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 structure on product pages - Should we apply canonicalized links in breadcrumbs or entry folders
We have products in the that go into mulitiple categories on our e-commerce site. But of course, each product is only canonicalized to one category. My question is: what should the breadcrumbs look like when users access a product from a non-canonicalized/primary category ?Should we apply canonicalized links in breadcrumbs or entry folders? For example: Let´s say we have product called "glacier hiking in the alps". It is in two categories; 1) glacier hiking 2) mountain tours. And is canonicalized to the glacier hiking category. If a user accesses it from the mountain tours category, should the url/breadcrumbs look like this: www.example.com/glacier-hiking/glacier-hiking-in-the-alps (because that is the canonicalized version) Or should it look like like this: www.example.com/mountain-tours/glacier-hiking-in-the-alps (because that is where the user came from) Thanks in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | guidetoiceland0 -
ECommcerce internal linking structure best practice
Hi, Can anyone advise on the best internal linking practice for an eCommerce website? Should the introduction copy on each category page contain naturally placed links down to sub categories and products and should each sub category link back up to the main category page. Is there a 'best practice' method of linking categories, sub categories and products? In terms of internal linking product pages, I presume the best practice would be to link other relevant products to each each? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SmiffysUK0 -
Internal Link Analysis (Site Wide)
Hi i'm currently doing a internal link analysis for one of my clients and want to pull internal link data for the entire website. So i can look at the distribution of internal anchor text and to identify ways in which we can optimize internal linking. I have had a look at screaming frog the trouble is, this data is only exportable one page at a time. Meaning, you can’t export an entire site “In Link” data. The site has 200+ pages so pulling in link data for each page would take quite long! Can anyone recommend anyways or tools which can look at the entire link profile for a website. I have checked OSE but there's not much data because the site is relatively new. Cheers, RM
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MBASydney0 -
Site Structure Question
Hi All, Got a question about site structure, I currently have a website where everything is hosted on the root of the domain. See example below: site.com/men site.com/men-shorts site.com/men-shorts-[product name] I want to change the structure to site.com/men/shorts/[product-name] I have asked a couple of SEOs and some agree with me that the structure needs to be changed and some say that as long as I dictate the structure with internal links and breadcrumbs the URL structure doesn't matter... What do you guys think? Many thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
How to structure your site correctly for optimal juice flow?
Hello fellow mozzers. I have a question regarding structuring a site for optimal link juice flow. If you have an existing website that has for instance a contact page, we know its pointless for that page to have any juice at all. In a hypothetical scenario would it be ok to no index, no follow that page? What happens to existing pagerank on such a page? for instance if you have a contact page with pr 4 and you no index, no follow it, I understand the pagerank will disappear from that page but will it be distributed to other pages on your site? What would be the correct way of handling this scenario?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rightmove0 -
Tips for Link Building for Mobile Sites
Hi, I wondered if anyone had any tips and advice for link building for mobile sites. Many thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MarkChambers0 -
Purchased new site with good SERP ranks, do I operate and build links or redirect the TLD?
I recently purchased a blog within my product category - it has many first page rankings for difficult keywords within my niche. I am wondering if it makes more sense for for me to continue to operate this blog and build links to my site and blog (blog is in wordpress) or to export the XML feed and upload the content to my blog (new site also in wordpress), at which point I would do a 301 at the Top-Level domain. Any thoughts, ideas, or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NickEubanks0 -
Worth changing existing link profile to make it more natural?
Hi Guys, I am picking up responbility for the SEO work for a company and I need some advice please. The current link stratgy involves a lot of single backlinks from the home page of variious sites. There is also a very big proprtion of the anchor text which is for the exact keyword and also finally there is very little deep linking. The result of this strategy is some 1st page ranking, but it has required a lot more links than some of the competitors with more natural link structure, Question is this.... is it worth contacting the webmasters of the existing links and asking then to move some of the links onto subpages and ammending the link tex to be move natural. Or alternaitvely, I could concenrate on adding some new article links, with a variety of keywords, which would be subdomain links. The problem with the 2nd approuch is that I can't easily add enough article links to balance out fully the effect of thecurrent problem. However, I'm nto sure if changing the position and the anchor text of the current linking could affect the current main site ranking... Can you see my problem? Any advice would be gratefully received. Cheers, Ed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eddiesteadygo0