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
-
I have just done a test with another wordpress site I run.
I changed the permalinks and the old URLs got redirected to the new URLs.
I checked if the redirect was a 301 and it was.
I dont have the redirection plugin installed.
It appears as though wordpress does this automatically.
-
Ok great. I hope so lol.
I will be moving hosting from a shared one to a VPS and use CDN so we can really speed up the site.
I am guessing that the best time to do the permalink change will be when we move servers.
Anything you suggest I should watch out for?
-
Hi John,
There is a plugin that allows you to edit permalinks for single posts, so you can decide what kind of permalink structure you want for each post from now. Here you have the link:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalink-editor/
However, as Marcus says, if your redirects are well done (and redirect plugin lets you do it), you don't have to worry about it.
Sergio
-
To be honest, I'm scared to change the permalinks now!
Terrified the the site will take a beating and drop rankings
The wordpress site is built using Genesis framework and Ive got Yoast SEO plugin installed.
I cant see it as simply just change the permalinks in wordpress and everythng works lol I wish it was that simple.
Does the redirection pluggin automatically create 301's?
I am sure that wordpress has that built in if I am correct. I recall changing permalinks in past wordpress sites and redrects happened
-
Hey, that is not possible with the default settings although there may be a plugin that could extend the functionality.
You would not see any problem from making a change in your permalink structure with the redirection plugin in place and whilst you may have a small bump whilst things switch over, if your URLs are getting crazy long then any slashes and characters you can remove is going to work in your favour.
Your best bet is likely to go one way or the other and personally, if you feel the date elements bring nothing to the table then I would make the change in the spirit of moving forwards.
_* I did come across an old plugin called Advanced Permalinks but lots of folks seem to have problems with it. _
-
Wow, great thanks Sergio. I have not seen the quoted info.
I understand totally, we always try to look at it from the users point of view.
We do not use the date archives on the site, so having the content in date folders I cant see adding any benefit.
I think the site can do a great deal better with the rankings certainly, but it is on the way up
We get a few interactions, but not many. Would like a lot more
Some of the URLs are getting very long also, so that another reason we would like to change the permalinks
I have also noticed that some of the older posts are dropping down the rankings. It appears a little faster then normal. This may not be anything to do with the permalinks, but its a thought i have had
It would be great if we could just somehow start all the posts from now onwards using the /%postname%/ structure. And all the past articles staying the same URL.
I dont see why we would have to change the already existing URL's of the past articles.
Is that possible do you know on a wordpress site?
-
Hi John,
If you look at SEOmoz PRO Dashboard On-page Resports, one issue they consider as Low Importance Factor is 'Minimal Subfolders in the URL'. They explain it as follows:
<dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">Explanation</dt>
<dd style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
The quantity of subfolders in a URL appears to correlate to rankings. URLs with fewer trailing slashes perform better than those with more. Additionally, search engine representatives have recommended that excessive, subfolders in a URL string may be a signal that the page is very deep in a site's structure and may be less valuable/worthwhile to crawl, index and rank.
</dd>
<dt style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">Recommendation</dt>
<dd style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;">
Rewrite the URL to include no more than 3 subfolder levels (4 trailing slashes following the domain name)
</dd>
However, I agree with Marcus. Think about your users and your website needs. Forget about Google and its way of crawling, indexing an so on. If you see a good performance from your users, what is bad?
Consider the following:
- Is your traffic good for your expectations?
- Is your traffic increasing through time?
- Do your users interact?
- Is your website well considered by your users?
If all your answers are YES, then keep on going. You´re doing very well.
If not, consider if minimizing subfolders could improve your website's experience (at all stages).
Hope it helps.
Sergio
-
Hi Marcus,
Thanks for your reply.
I noticed that some other big news sites dont use the date in the URL's, but the posts show the date.
My concern is that Google may lower the rankings over time as it knows these pages are time sensitive.
Thanks for the redirection plugin link. We currently use that on the site.
-
I don't really think this is an SEO question as such and lots of well ranked sites have the year and month in the URL.
Really, it all depends on what works best for you and your users.
- Are the pages and stories date specific?
- Will having just the page names make for better looking URLs?
Try to think about this outside of the SEO mindset and do whatever is best for the content and your users as you are not going to get any kind of noticeable SEO boost from removing the date from the URLs.
But, if you do decide to do this, and assuming this is WordPress from the terminology, then if you install the redirection plugin it will create automatic 301 redirections for any page names you change so it could save you a whole load of work.
Obviously, this is not a specific answer, only you can provide that, but think of it not as an SEO fix but think of your users and how this would effect them in a positive way.
Hope that helps!
MarcusReferences:
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
-
SEO: How to change page content + shift its original content to other page at the same time?
Hello, I want to replace the content of one page of our website (already indexeed) and shift its original content to another page. How can I do this without problems like penalizations etc? Current situation: Page A
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | daimpa
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: ContentPageA Desired situation: Page A
URL: example.com/formula-1
Content: NEW CONTENT! Page B
URL: example.com/formula-1-news
Content: ContentPageA (The content that was in Page A!) Content of the two pages will be about the same argument (& same keyword) but non-duplicate. The new content in page A is more optimized for search engines. How long will it take for the page to rank better?0 -
Positions dropping in SERPs after Title and Snippet change
Hi! I switched to a better title and meta description today for our page. Instead of ranking us better and displaying the new title - google let us fall from Position 10 to Position 16 (still dip laying the old title and meta description). Why is that? (I only changed it for the homepage) Cheers Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RWW0 -
Keywords Ranking Varies When Search changes Location/City (Not Google Places)
We have a client that are ranking well on most Australian cities for competitive keywords except Google Sydney. If you toggled the cities on the search field when you search for a keyword, their places are almost exactly the same except for Sydney on which they can't be found at all in the Top 100 results. The keywords are not city specific, they are general commonly searched keywords about health. This is not a Google Places issue. The search result shows the right landing pages of the site for their respective keywords. Any ideas or experience on this kind of situation. Much appreciated Louie
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | louieramos0 -
Duplicate content when changing a site's URL due to algorithm penalty
Greetings A client was hit by penguin 2.1, my guess is that this was due to linkbuilding using directories. Google webmaster tools has detected about 117 links to the site and they are all from directories. Furthermore, the anchor texts are a bit too "perfect" to be natural, so I guess this two factors have earned the client's site an algorithm penalty (no manual penalty warning has been received in GWT). I have started to clean some of the backlinks, on Oct the 11th. Some of the webmasters I asked complied with my request to eliminate backlinks, some didn´t, I disavowed the links from the later. I saw some improvements on mid october for the most important KW (see graph) but ever since then the rankings have been falling steadily. I'm thinking about giving up on the domain name and just migrating the site to a new URL. So FINALLY MY QUESTION IS: if I migrate this 6-page site to a new URL, should I change the content completely ? I mean, if I just copy paste the content of the curent site into a new URL I will incur in dpolicate content, correct?. Is there some of the content I can copy ? or should I just start from scratch? Cheers hRggeNE
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Masoko-T0 -
After reading of Google's so called "over-optimization" penalty, is there a penalty for changing title tags too frequently?
In other words, does title tag change frequency hurt SEO ? After changing my title tags, I have noticed a steep decline in impressions, but an increase in CTR and rankings. I'd like to once again change the title tags to try and regain impressions. Is there any penalty for changing title tags too often? From SEO forums online, there seems to be a bit of confusion on this subject...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Felix_LLC0 -
301 redirect changed googles cached title tags ??
Hi, This is a new one to me ?! I recently added some 301 redirects from pages that I've removed from my site. Most of them just redirect to my home page, whilst a few redirect to appropriate replacement pages. The odd thing is that when I now search my keywords googles serp shows my website with a title that was on some of the old (now removed and redirected) pages. Is this normal? If so, how should I prevent this from happening? What is going on? The only reasons I set up the redirects was to collect any link juice from the old pages and prevent 404s. Should I remove the 301s? I fetched as google and submitted - to see if that updates the tags. (not been indexed yet) Any help would be appreciated. Kind Regards Tony
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thephoenix250 -
Anyone managed to change 'At a glance:' in local search results
On Google's local search results, i.e when the 'Google places' data is displayed along with the map on the right hand side of the search results, there is also an element 'At a glance:'
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DeanAndrews
The data that if being displayed is from some years ago and the client would if possible like it to reflect there current services, which they have been providing for some five years. According to Google support here - http://support.google.com/maps/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1344353 this cannot be changed, they say 'Can I edit a listing’s descriptive terms or suggest a new one?
No; the terms are not reviewed, curated, or edited. They come from an algorithm, and we do not help that algorithm figure it out. ' My question is has anyone successfully influenced this data and if so how.0 -
Changing domain reigstrant - seo impact
Hi there if you get a domain off someone and change registrant details and hosting, to what extent does this affect the power of the site? Any opinions of interest, many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pauledwards0